Professional Documents
Culture Documents
C ou r s e o u t l in e ...................................................................................................................................................... 3
N e xt ‐o f ‐K in ....................................................................................................................................................... 6
C o me ‐ and ‐marry/ROMANCE ....................................................................................................................... 8
Business Opportunity .................................................................................................................................. 10
C h ap t er outline ................................................................................................................................................. 16
C h ap t er 1 ‐ Genesis ......................................................................................................................................... 17
S i zz l er .................................................................................................................................................................... 25
Onome ................................................................................................................................................................... 37
R et r ibu t io n .......................................................................................................................................................... 42
C h ap t er 4 ‐ Women ............................................................................................................................................... 61
Tope ....................................................................................................................................................................... 68
P r e iy e .................................................................................................................................................................... 70
P h i sh in g For P la s t ic .......................................................................................................................................... 76
T h e A sc en s io n .................................................................................................................................................... 93
PART ONE
FRAUD 101– INTRODUCTION TO 419
COURSE OUTLINE
1. The 419er
2. The tools of the trade
3. The method – the story/”format”
4. The staging
5. Continuing the work
LECTURE 1 ‐ THE 419ER
The term “419” comes from the section of the Nigerian criminal code
that deals with fraud such as obtaining property by false pretence,
crimes of persuasion, stealing and the like. The individual who
engages in advance‐fee fraud or “419” doesn’t have to fit into a
particular mould or come from any particular demographic. This
individual could be male or female, young or much older, university
graduate or high school drop‐out, could be from any tribe, or even be
working from any country in the world.
The only things he or she must have are an urge to make a lot of
money and impatience to work for years to acquire it through a
normal career. To start in this trade, there has to be a sort of
mentorship – a process of learning the ropes from someone who is
already established in the business, this person is usually called
“Chairman”. This process will include running of errands for the
chairman, keeping watch over the several email accounts used for
jobs, browsing for and accumulating email addresses to receive the
story being cooked up, amongst other things.
Oftentimes a chairman can receive jobs from guys we call job
“catchers” or “owners”. I call them part‐time guy‐men and they work
sort of freelance. What they do is to blast (spam, to the rest of you)
emails on their own, cultivate the positive replies and then hand over
these positives to a chairman to work. They share whatever comes
from the mugu with the chairman or the chairman could buy their
jobs outright.
LECTURE 2 ‐ THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Computers – the computer is used to design the documents used to
con the victim, it is also used to browse the internet for contacts and
also to run software such as email spiders and email blasters.
Internet – the internet is the main tool the 419er uses to cultivate
and work his “client” or “mugu” (mugu ‐ a derogatory name for the
victim being worked meaning fool). The internet is the means for
setting up fake web sites for jobs, getting contacts of foreigners
online, chatting, emailing etc.
Web Sites & Email Accounts – in addition to the internet, websites
are set up to represent fictitious firms and government agencies also
several email accounts are created for fake officials.
Phones and Fax – these are used to make and receive calls to and
from clients and also to send and receive hard copy of documents for
the job. A true “job‐guy” cannot operate without several of these.
Domiciliary Bank Accounts – these are opened and maintained to
make (and sometimes receive) payments for jobs. Other types of
accounts like credit card accounts, Paypal and E‐gold can also be used
depending on the peculiarities of the job at hand.
International Money Payment Systems – these systems are used to
receive payments from victims, the more popular ones are Western
Union and Moneygram.
LECTURE 3 ‐ THE METHOD – THE STORY/”FORMAT”
The method to be used depends on how the contact was cultivated.
Hence there are several methods (or “formats”). I will mention just
three:
NEXT‐OF‐KIN
STAGE 1
In this format, hundreds of email addresses are sent emails detailing
how a certain relation of the email recipient had died in another
foreign country, leaving a huge amount of money behind while
naming the email recipient as the sole beneficiary of the money. Each
email sent is edited so that the first name of the recipient is included
in the body of the mail to make the message seem undeniably
personal to each recipient.
This stage of the job could be handled by the boys working under the
chairman.
STAGE 2
In the next stage, all email addresses that respond to the first mail
are collated and sorted into different categories such as positive
reply, negative reply and skeptical reply.
The contact who replied positively is further worked by being asked
to send a copy of their passport and other contact information to
confirm their identity as a sort of “investigation” before the process
of the transfer of the money commences. This is done to further
convince the respondent about the authenticity of the information.
The contact who replied negatively is sent more personalized but
official‐looking mails asking the respondent why he is treats such a
genuine opportunity with disdain. This is done to get his attention as
an attempt to salvage that respondent. A surprising number of
negative respondents are turned positive by this single effort.
The skeptical respondent is sent another personalized mail explaining
how billions of Dollars lie in bank accounts all around the world
because next‐of‐kin don’t come forward to claim the monies of
deceased relatives, the respondent is sometimes threatened that if
he is not ready to come forward the next next‐of‐kin will be located
and given the money. This is done to convince the skeptic that this
information on unclaimed money is genuine.
Any negative or skeptic that is later convinced is added to the list of
positives for further “processing”. This stage could also be handled by
the chairman’s boys depending on their level of experience, or by the
chairman himself.
STAGE 3
When the contact has been thus cultivated and convinced of the
existence of the money, the job is left now to the chairman who now
calls or emails the mugu with details and a timeline for the entire
process, culminating with the respondent receiving the money. The
respondent is required to pay several charges as non‐refundable
processing or administrative fees in the process, he will also be told
to mask these transactions to keep the process confidential to avoid
taxes on the transaction. Once the first payment is made, the victim
is hooked because he finds it hard to stop, so blinded by the promise
of the stupendous wealth about to come.
STAGE 4
The next stage is the shock stage when the 419er does an about turn,
having just “discovered” his “error” that the recipient is not the true
beneficiary of the money. The respondent, understandably outraged,
now asks for compensation and after being made to sweat it out for
some time is told that the money could still be given to him even
though it’s not rightfully his. He is told that the previous mistake
could be covered up and his name entered as the “true beneficiary”,
all that is needed from the victim is more money to cover up the
mistake, to make bribes to the proper officials and also to create and
add the proper documentation to back this change. This is the climax
of the job and is only handled by the chairman in conjunction with
others he contracts to act as the officials in the agency overseeing
the “transfer process”.
CLOSURE
When the job has gotten to this level, after the victim has paid a lot
of money, more stories are fed to him until he finally wakes up to the
scam and stops paying money. The job is shut down, all email
accounts closed, all phone and fax numbers tossed, sometimes bank
accounts are shutdown (usually after a huge amount has passed
through it).
COME‐AND‐MARRY/ROMANCE
STAGE 1
In this format, the 419er goes to several online chat rooms, searching
for the right kind of victim. Sometimes the con man/woman goes to
online dating websites to scout for victims with the right profile; from
there the initial contact is made. The job is usually carried out on
victims of the opposite sex of the 419er. Sometimes even that may
not always be the case, for example a male 419er (masking as a
woman) could carry out the come‐and‐marry scheme on another
male. This scheme is almost always carried out by a single 419er and
there since there is no single method to this job, the 419er is free to
adapt as he/she deems necessary. This 419 scheme come lowest in
terms bulk of individual payments but its advantage over others is
that it pays over a longer period of time, sometimes into years.
STAGE 2
From the point the initial contact is made, chat identities are
received and sorted by how the job is to be carried out and also by
what the victim has indicated he/she is looking for in a relationship.
They are then added to the 419er’s list of friends in the chatting
software like Microsoft Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger.
Whenever the contact is online, the job commences/resumes. At this
stage the victim is gradually seduced with the right words and images
(sometime real but mostly fake pictures of the jobbie).The con
man/woman is at liberty to choose the tone and timing of the
interaction, till the victim is adjudged ready to pay.
STAGE 3
This is the point when the “billing” starts. The con man/woman can
come up with whatever reason that is most likely to elicit a favorable
response and also pay up from the victim, this might be money to
arrange for travel documents and pay for flight to come and see the
victim at his/her country, it could be money to start a business on
behalf of the victim over here. Whichever reason that is given must
be consistent with the previous discussions between the con
man/woman and the victim and must also be delivered in a manner
that is less likely to arouse suspicious in the victim. This is the longest
stage of this scheme and can be extended and sustained only by the
skill of the 419er.
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
STAGE 1
This particular scheme pays very well like the next‐of‐kin con, both in
terms of bulk of individual mugu payments and duration of mugu
“paying period”. It requires a level of expertise in the game only
mastered by a few chairmen. In this scheme, just as in next‐of‐kin,
hundreds of email addresses are blasted with a message carrying a
proposal about a mouth‐watering investment/business opportunity in
a certain African country.
A common example is the 419 scheme in which a certain army general
in an African country had stashed away $100 000 000 in a domiciliary
account in a local bank. Because of strong rumors of an impending
coup attempt, the general instructs his eldest son to look for a way to
get that money out of the country quickly. The recipient of the email
is asked to help move this large amount into his own foreign bank
account for later reinvesting in the recipient’s country (thereby
acting as a business associate) and in return is promised about 20% of
the total amount successfully moved out.
This stage of the job is usually handled by the boys working under the
chairman.
STAGE 2
Also responses to the first email are collated and sorted according to
their replies; positive, negative or skeptical.
The contact who replies positively is further worked by being asked to
send a copy of their passport and other contact information to
confirm their identity. Also he/she is told to provide banking
coordinates and other financial information to facilitate the process
of documentation and for verification by the local bank in preparation
for the transfer.
The contact who replies negatively is sent more personalized mails
asking the respondent why he/she treats such a genuine opportunity
with disdain. This is done to somehow get his attention in an attempt
to salvage that respondent.
The skeptical or negative respondent is sent a carefully worded mail
urging him not to disregard such an opportunity. The respondent is
made to believe that the sender took a great risk by going to the
internet with such information. Other methods may include berating
the respondent that if he is too timid/not willing to engage in this
once‐in‐a‐lifetime opportunity that there a lot of people searching for
such opportunities around the world.
This level once again can be handled by the chairman or his more
experienced boys.
STAGE 3
Those who are confirmed positive are now handed to the chairman
who begins the gradual process of milking the mugu. The victim is
charged the first of several administrative fees to register his
documentation and again to pay for the verification process before
the supplied banking data is usable for the transfer. As always, the
mugu is required to keep the transactions confidential. Any well
thought‐out excuse can be used to collect more money from the
victim at this point, always keeping the reasons plausible enough to
justify the charges.
STAGE 4
Much later on, after the victim has coughed up good money and is
becoming more and more agitated that he hasn’t received anything
for all the effort, a good reason for the delay given. This reason is
almost always a change in the banking polices of the nation that has
required banks not to make direct money transfers to unrelated
foreign accounts. The victim is told that the only way out of the
problem is for him to open an account in the local bank using the
exact same particulars as his own bank account in his country,
through this “special” account the transfer can be effected. Again he
is charged administrative fees for this new account to be opened and
operated on his behalf, involving the presentation of a lot of phony
but official‐looking legal documents meant to show proof of the new
account created and also the transfer of the money into the account.
This is done to set the victim’s mind at ease, sometimes the use of
well designed bank web sites can be applied to achieve this same
effect. Through this online account, the victim can log into his own
account to confirm that the account has been credited with the said
money.
STAGE 5
After a while when the victim notices that the money is still not
forthcoming, he is told that a little problem has come up. He is either
told that the governor of the central bank of the nation has found out
about this secret transaction and has halted the transfer process,
threatening to reveal the information to the Head of State if he is not
properly “settled”. Or that the transaction was leaked to the military
top brass and to be able to hush it up and continue the process, some
palms have to be greased. The mugu is reminded that whatever
amount he is asked to pay to overcome this minor setback is
miniscule compared to the cash bullion sitting and waiting for him at
the end of this lengthy process. This is usually when the largest
amount is extracted from the victim and when the 419er really shows
his expertise.
CLOSURE
As before, this process continues until the victim finally wakes up to
the scam and stops paying up. The tools of trade traceable to the
particular scheme are all shutdown and the job is concluded.
LECTURE 4 ‐ THE STAGING
The jobs that have paid up the most money were schemes that have
involved a “staging”. Almost any job can be staged, this is when the
victim is invited to the country, received at the airport, hosted in a
good hotel and psychologically worked on so that he believes the
process is 100% genuine. Usually after such a staging, the victim is
well assured and when he returns to his home, vigorously goes in
search of more money to send down.
For example, in the business opportunity scheme detailed above, the
mugu can be invited into the country and given the whole works:
received at the airport by men in military uniforms and lodged at a 5‐
star hotel, shown the finest places and women, driven around in a
military convoy and made to meet “top military officers”. After this
display, the victim, rightfully awed, reckons that for anyone to be
able expend such resources, the person must be true military top
brass and therefore the transaction genuine.
LECTURE 5 ‐ CONTINUING THE WORK
Depending on the skill of the chairman who handled a scheme,
certain jobs can be reactivated and made profitable again. Only the
best of job‐guys can successfully pull this off, and it involves the new
man taking over a closed down job and reworking it. He gains the
trust of the victim by presenting himself as a member of an agency
set up to investigate failed transfer cases like that of the victim’s and
to offer redress when a case is shown to be authentic and
documentation available for the victim’s claims to be verified. He
could even show “proof” that the previous official was arrested and
jailed for defrauding several innocent individuals.
As before, the victim is made to pay certain charges to effect the
registration and documentation of his previous attempt to get his
money. Before long the victim finds himself being tossed around once
again and the old process is repeated.
PART TWO
419 – THE STORY
CHAPTER OUTLINE
1. Genesis
2. Fall out
3. Jobs
4. Women
5. Ghana Expedition
6. The Patriot
CHAPTER 1 ‐ GENESIS
My name is Chux, my friends sometimes call me Chuxie. I’m a job‐guy,
a guy‐man, a jobbie, a yahoo boy, a 19 guy, a full‐time con man (just
don’t call me that to my face). A modern day Robin Hood from Africa,
who robs the rich (white man) to pay the poor (mostly myself).
I had the privilege to be born “aje butter”, having mostly all I wanted
as a kid growing up in Festac town, Lagos. I am the first of two
children born to Ibo parents. My kid sister, Cynthia, was born a year
after me and because the doctors thought it would be too risky for
my mom to bear more children my parents decided two was ok
anyway. We both had the best private education available at the time
and I dare say it gave me a slight superiority complex when I grew old
enough to know the difference between me and other kids on our
street who attended government schools. My parents weren’t rich
strictly speaking, but were able to provide more than enough for me
and my sibling.
My mother died when I was nine from complications after a failed
surgery to remove a malignant growth in her throat. This was just as I
was about to enter secondary school and I took ill so bad it took me
behind about six months in my studies. As a result of that I was made
to repeat class one of secondary school. You can understand my
disappointment because I was already ahead of my peers coming out
of primary school; I was awarded a double promotion when I was in
primary three because the teachers felt my mental capacity was far
above the level of instruction at that class. So, there at the start of
secondary school I lost whatever grounds I had gained, I found myself
behind schoolmates I had started secondary school with.
Secondary school was a trying time for me not only for the fact that
for the first time in my life I found myself behind my peers but also
because my size made me a natural first choice for bully fodder. I
didn’t inherit my dad’s imposing masculine structure, my body
instead chose to emulate too much of my mom’s slender features. I
felt this was unacceptable and wasn’t ready to take the bullying lying
down. So whenever I was bullied, I just waited until the bully least
expected it to exact a most painful and embarrassing revenge. Once I
was flogged twenty‐four strokes of the cane on my bare back in front
of the school assembly because I planted a rusted nine inch nail on a
seat just before Jaiye (our class bully) sat down. He spent three
weeks in the hospital and from then on no one dared to bully or even
fight me.
The rest of my secondary school experience was as ordinary as any
other’s. For example, in secondary school I learnt the usual stuff like
how to take pain without showing hurt, there I learnt to curse like an
agbero on the streets, I learnt also to use the power of insinuation to
manipulate others.
I finished secondary school at the ripe old age of fifteen and
returning home to wait an extra year before I would be eligible to
apply for entry into the university, I found myself with so much time
to waste and no one to control me. My dad was a permanent
secretary in the ministry of finance and was rarely home before seven
o’clock in the evenings. I had my first stick of cigarette a month
before my sixteenth birthday and I coughed my lungs out that day,
from that day I never wanted another taste, what was the use
anyway? I thought the damn thing would taste great!
I gained admission into the Lagos state university and elected to
study Economics, my dad didn’t think much of the course, calling it
“unexciting” but he had the good wisdom to let me do my thing. In
my second year of the university, ASUU went on strike to protest
against unreasonable wages for lecturers and like a joke, the strike
stretched on for months. Into the third month with no end to the
strike action in sight, my dad introduced me to a church member who
had a computer outfit. The man had been out of the country for some
time and had returned to set up a computer literacy school.
That was when I met Silas who incidentally was also attending LASU. I
started lectures on computer use and desktop applications, later on
adding a course on the use of the internet. Silas was there to take a
single course in graphic applications. I found myself excited to be
doing something out of the ordinary because then only a few people
could boast of knowing how to use a computer, much less knowing
what the internet was.
My dad noticed I had a flair for the computer and got me my first
computer, a Toshiba Satellite 486 machine, on a trip to the UK. He
also paid for an internet connection, a dial‐up set up that required
you to try uncountable times before the connection to the service
provider went through. This connection gave me my first glimpse of a
world beyond my own and before long I started spending less and less
time playing my Sega Dreamcast game console and more time in front
of the computer screen. Silas became a regular caller at my house and
together we practiced what we learnt at computer school on my
laptop. Silas is a born artist and he was learning how to use the
computer to recreate the things he sketched by hand.
On day we were going through some online forum about computer
graphics software and read about Corel Draw, one guy kept going on
and on about its power and ease of use. Silas had something I jokingly
call “the epiphany” on the spot and we decided right away that we
would get the software. My dad had a friend in the UK who had
become a family friend so I emailed him to get it for us, two weeks
later a DHL parcel came containing a pack of twelve diskettes. I
installed my first software application on my laptop that morning,
inserting and swapping in the diskettes, marveling at the bright colors
of the installation program and the logical construct of it all.
Silas arrived as I was inserting the last diskette of the set and we
waited impatiently for the process to conclude. When we fired up the
software my excitement was deflated, I can’t say what exactly I was
expecting but I was disappointed by the software showing on the
screen. Why, it looked just like any other software! Silas was not
fazed, and was still nosing around the software when I lost interest
and decided I wanted to go do something else.
The strike action was called off after five months, when a truce was
reached between the government and the striking lecturers. Silas
returned to school to continue his course in graphic and applied arts
but I found I had lost that urge to go to school. I started missing
lectures, then quizzes, then even exams.
At the end of my second year, I had failed eight out of the ten
courses I had to take. My dad was livid with rage and sent me to go
stay with his strict elder sister at Surulere also in Lagos, whom he
reckoned would have ample time to keep an eye on me. There was
one little thing he overlooked and that was that Surulere was farther
from LASU than Festac town, so now there were more excuses for me
to give for not showing up in school early and even more for coming
home late at night. There were always excuses like “heavy traffic
jam”, “lack of connecting bus” and even sometimes “violent clashes
between rival cult groups on campus”.
By the time my lecturers in school complained to my dad that I didn’t
write the entire third year first semester exams, my dad gave up
trying, called me back home and asked me of my plans for myself. I
told him I wasn’t interested in economics anymore, that I wanted to
start afresh but this time on a computer related university course. My
plan was to wait till the next year to apply for the computer science
but my dad suggested I look for some job till then, that was when and
how I met Frank Ikechi.
Frank was at that time setting up a cyber café and was looking for
someone to manage the computers in it. I walked up to him and after
we talked for a few minutes, he decided I would do for the job. While
working at his café, my skills at fixing the computer sharpened and I
also picked up on administering a computer network, keeping the
computers virus free and handling a host of issues with customers
and their browsing needs.
That was also my first foray into the 419 world. I noticed that Frank
had a particular computer in his cubicle office, he never left me alone
with that computer even when I had to perform lengthy tasks on it
and many times after we close for the day he stays inside, working on
it. When I tried to snoop into the computer, I found he had used a
two‐password system to prevent unauthorized access to it; even after
I overcame the initial system BIOS password, I found he had applied
another one at the user interface level. When I later asked him what
he did on the computer, he replied lightly by asking me “You won be
guy‐man?”
This was what got me curious to know what it meant to be a “guy‐
man” so I put my ears down and watched the kind of guys Frank
rolled with. I also made sure I took note of the web sites Frank visited
from that computer. You see I installed the proxy software that made
it possible for a network of twenty‐two computers to share an
internet connection from one source. The proxy software had a mode
in which you could view in real‐time the internet activity from any
computer on the network.
Through this bit of cyber investigation I learnt he mostly went to a
web site specializing in providing international faxing services to
enable anyone with a computer and an internet connection to send
faxes to any country in the world. I also found that a certain guy
prepared “documents” for him here in Festac but I got my big
investigative break when Frank told me to scan a document into a
diskette for him one morning before the other workers resumed, I
noticed this document had the government coat of arms on it. After I
scanned the document I told Frank that I had to scan the diskette for
viruses before I copied the scanned image file into it, under this
pretext I made another copy of the file and hid it.
Later on when I was alone, I viewed the image file and read the text
which spoke of how a certain official of NNPC in Nigeria had stashed
away $20 000 000 and was looking for a foreign business partner to
help him invest it worldwide in return for twenty five percent of the
money. The document looked quite authentic and I remember
wondering if Frank was an NNPC top guy for real, amazed that he was
so young to have achieved such a status.
It didn’t take long for me to put the pieces together and realize that
Frank and his cronies were actually con‐men. Rather than being
shocked, I felt I had that revelation coming. That was the only way
their loud and glossy lifestyles could be explained. I opened my eyes
wider to the world around me and found that many of the users of
our cyber café were working along the same lines, I started
discovering all manner of fake but well prepared documents carrying
government coat of arms and logos of several state agencies. These
documents usually had quite outrageous claims of huge amounts of
money stashed in all manner of places for all manner of reasons just
as there were others who used the ongoing war situations in some
African nations as the basis for their “job format”. Others still made
use of stories of fictitious motherless babies’ homes as their format
for fraud, soliciting for money from foreigners to “fund” them.
ALAGBON CLOSE CELL
The day Interpol came knocking on at the cyber café, I had just
finished running maintenance tasks on my computer network, this
included scanning all computer systems for viruses and deleting all
scam documents found therein. We had a momentary disagreement
over the monthly subscription payment with the internet service
provider so the place was quite empty when two white men with
laptops stepped in, I rose up to explain to them that our “server” was
down before I saw four armed men standing just outside the
entrance.
They showed me a warrant for the search and possible closure of the
place because the unique IP address that identified my network on
the internet had been petitioned at the US embassy in Lagos for being
used for 419 related offences. On the spot I did a quick mental check
of what might be found on my computers to implicate my café as a
conduit for scam and fraudulent schemes and decided I was safe. The
men were quick in bundling me and a colleague to a corner while they
searched through all our computer systems for whatever it was they
were after, I was feeling smug with myself until I remembered that I
had had no access to Frank’s personal computer. I was dead sure that
if these men found their way into that computer, they would finally
have their proof. My next prayer was that Frank’s password system
would hold up against their attempts to override it, I was to be
disappointed because the laptops the white men were carrying were
running a powerful password breaking software. They forced their
way into Frank’s locked cubicle and under five minutes his computer
was spilling beans.
Even thought it was just a single computer that had incriminating
evidence on it, the men confiscated all computers in the café and
bundled me into one of the jeeps they came in. I alone was taken into
custody because earlier on I had told them I was responsible for all
computers in the place. The cyber café was sealed off and we left for
the then Police force headquarters at Alagbon, Lagos. When we got to
the place I was interrogated by a polite police officer. I was asked to
reveal the location of Frank’s residence to which I (honestly) told
them I couldn't because I didn’t know it. I was later put into one of
the cells there to “cool off”. I was told that even though they knew
that I had committed no offence that I should pray that my boss
comes out to face the music himself or I would be made to bear the
full punishment for his crime.
I was to spend two nights in detention and during that time I was
forced to do some serious sober reflection on the events that had led
me, a teenager, to be held by the police on fraud related charges. I
wasn’t too worried about what my dad would think or do because
before I was taken away, I had told my colleague at the café to tell
Cynthia to tell my dad that I was working overnight at the café
clearing a major virus outbreak on my computer network.
On the evening of my third day at Alagbon, a call came for me from a
lawyer. After a lengthy process of paper work, I was released on bail
of N500 000 (a hefty amount even by today’s standards). It was
revealed to me in confidence by the lawyer that Frank had to use
some of his high‐level contacts at Abuja to effect that almost
impossible release. When I asked him how he did it, the lawyer gave
me a quote I will never forget: “With special arrangement, even Devil
go fit see God”.
On my return home I was hailed as a kind of hero for taking the
punishment like a man and not revealing anything, I guess on the
streets one earns his stripes by showing loyalty. I gained a sort of
celebrity status and overnight I became quite popular in Festac town.
When I got home that night I found that Cynthia had covered for me
like a true soldier. I gave my dad the story that the morning after I
had finished removing the network virus some policemen from
Alagbon force headquarters came and seized the equipment there
and sealed off the cyber café. I told him that rumor had it that some
people were using the computers at the café to engage in fraudulent
business.
SIZZLER
Two weeks after my “visit” to the force headquarters I had a caller at
my house. The caller requested I come out to meet him at his car,
parked outside our compound gate. The car was the latest BMW 7
series, maroon colored, and the man on the wheels was “Sizzler”
Ikechi, Frank’s elder brother. He told me to hop in and we drove off.
When we were out of the street, he asked me “so how you dey?”,
“Fine” I replied. “You and Frank don see since you come back?” he
enquired. “No o! I never see am” I replied. He then smiled and
regretfully shook his head, “Na the problem with Frank be that, he no
dey sabi show appreciation.” I was wondering what he meant so I
asked “appreciation for what?” His reply was “any person wey fit
sleep inside police cell for you deserve make you compensate am
because no bi everybody fit do am” He was trying to tell me Frank
was ungrateful for not calling on me to even say thanks for going in
for him and not squealing on him. I felt the whole thing was no big
deal so I told him “I no do wetin I do because I want make Frank tell
me ‘thank you’, besides, I know say the police people still dey search
for Frank so him need to lay low for some time”
Sizzler smiled and nodded like he liked my response and said “anyway
no worry, most of the big men wey dey Nigeria don sleep for Alagbon
before, so for you to enter am at this young age mean say you go
soon become big man sef” . We stopped over at a joint and took a
couple of drinks. After that he folded some N500 bills and put them in
my shirt breast pocket and told me to meet him at the same joint the
next day by one o’clock. He drove off and I took an “okada” bike
home.
The next day I was at the place by some minutes after one, Sizzler
didn’t show up until two thirty, ‘African time’. He proposed a deal to
me: he said he had set of three brand new computer systems at his
residence and he wanted me to network them then after that, I would
work for him setting up “jobs”, we would share the proceeds from the
jobs 70/30. I thought the idea wasn’t so bad, after all I had been
arrested and detained by the police for something I had no hand in, I
could as well make some money from the resultant offer by Sizzler.
I was to find out later that Sizzler’s was the hand that had worked to
produce my quick release from the police cell. He had heard about
Frank’s café closure and flew in the same night from the UK where he
was “staging” a “client” straight to Abuja where he had some
powerful contacts high up in the Nigerian police hierarchy. He had
spent about two million Naira to achieve that feat.
Now Sizzler’s real name is Fortune Ikechi, the “Sizzler” thing started
during his days at the University of Nigeria, Nnsuka where he was
known as a fan of the Jamaican raga artiste. He had actually
performed some of Sizzler’s songs at university gigs and he did the
songs so well that most people started calling him “Sizzler” to the
extent that almost everyone now know him only by the name.
After graduating from the university, he was employed by the NNPC,
Nigeria’s oil and gas giant where his eyes opened up quickly to the
opportunities for international business that a smart young man
could harness to make big money. Working with two other senior
officials, he made an inside deal with one of the Russian firms that
lifted natural gas from the NNPC. The arrangement was that he would
shave off some of the administrative charges, disguised as an
accounting omission. The firm would then kick ninety percent of the
money saved from the omission back to Fortune and co.
Everything went smoothly on the deal and Sizzler made a cool $45
000 from it (converted to Naira that was N5 850 000). Trouble came
up a month later when the gist filtered to the regional manager that
some of the men under him had done a runs right under his nose. The
man ordered an internal audit and found the men involved in the job.
Three heads rolled and this was even after the manager was bribed
with $10 000 not to report the case to the police.
Sizzler returned home with his balance of the money (now $40 000),
he discovered that he had lost the desire to work at a normal job to
earn in a whole year what he could net in a single deal. He felt he
could do much better than those hypocrites at NNPC by using his
head and a few other “resources”. In his first scam, he used his
knowledge of NNPC procedure to sidetrack a group of Saudi Arabian
businessmen looking to move into oil and gas contracting. Working
with one of the senior guys who had been axed from the NNPC, he
staged the men at the Abuja Hilton, presented them with falsified but
solid‐looking documentation and made a killing of $3 400 000.
Sizzler felt he was on to something, so he sent for his younger
brother who had just graduated from the university to join him and
together they started looking for other “job opportunities”. Before
long, scams they had cultivated were paying up real good ‐ Frank
made the preliminary connections here in Nigeria while Fortune
finished it up with a staging in Jand (the UK) or Yankee (the US).
Together they were like the Blues Brothers of Nigerian fraud, tag‐
teaming to execute some really classic scams.
They had run the show that way for five years until Frank decided to
invest some of the money he had made into some quick paying but
legit business. He reasoned that someday, the government would
wake up to their activities and he wanted to have some other source
of good clean income up and running on that day. Someone suggested
setting up a cyber café to him and he bought it, it was a novel idea at
the time and the returns would pay back the initial investment under
six months, plus he could use the fast internet connection to “blast”
faxes worldwide.
The business had run for eight months when the Interpol bust
happened.
LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE
After I had set up all the computers and networked them to share the
internet connection at his residence, Sizzler had me register five new
email accounts on Yahoo. The new mail addresses were to be used to
send scam emails to thousands of email addresses worldwide. After
we had run the blasting like that for two weeks, I decided to search
on the internet to see if there was a software application that
automated the process. I searched for less than an hour before I
found one such application, the maker was charging $250 for a copy
of the software.
I explained to Sizzler how the software would make our work faster
and efficient as against the present method in which we had to
manually send each mail to each recipient one by one. Sizzler went
online at once and purchased the software and with it I was able to
send approximately one thousand mails every forty‐five minutes per
computer and with the three computers working in parallel, I was
sending three thousand mails under the hour. Now I could really
claim to be “blasting”! That evening we received sixteen replies,
twelve of them were positive. Immediately Sizzler made a call to the
guy from whom he bought email addresses to send him a batch of ten
thousand more email addresses.
I followed up on the twelve positive replies by requesting for their
personal and financial information for “verification” and then
forwarding the information and addresses to Sizzler who started
working on the “clients”. The man was a real pro; less than a month
later ten out of the twelve had paid the first of several administrative
charges to come to them. We were working the contacts on a “next‐
of‐kin” scam and the first payment we took from them was a
“registration of next‐of‐kin information” fee of $1 500. My head was
already swooning with the financial implications of my 30% cut of $15
000, that was $4 500.
At the closure of that particular job three months later, all the
“clients” had paid up, some a lot more than others. The least amount
we extracted was $2 000 from a contact in Sweden who (I think) got
suspicious and stopped replying our mails. The best paying contact
was a Venezuelan who had naturalized in the US, he paid us a total of
$18 500. In total we made about $136 000 from our first
collaboration. My cut in it was $40 800 (N5 304 000), I was barely
nineteen then.
Before Sizzler was to pay the money into my bank account he asked
me what I planned to do with the money and I told him I wanted to
have a place of my own because my dad was already uncomfortable
with the hours I kept. He suggested that I wait a year more until I was
twenty before thinking of touching the money and as an incentive he
made me a bargain I could not refuse, he said if I left the money
untouched (with him) for a year, he would double whatever my total
cut was. He told me that he wanted me to gain a little more maturity
and experience in life so as not to get carried away by that much
cash. He nonetheless gave me N500 000 to “arrange” myself and the
first thing my young and dumb mind could want for was a Ducati 995
superbike. Funny thing was I didn’t know how to ride a bike then but
that didn’t stop me. That chopped off N220 000 out of the money and
I wasn’t even thinking of how I would explain how I came about that
kind of money to my dad before I took it home. When he asked me
about the bike I lied that it belonged to a close friend of mine whose
family had moved to Dubai. Explaining that he had left the machine
with me for safe keeping since he knew I couldn’t ride it. I knew he
didn’t believe a word I said but I was past caring, I had the dream
bike even if I had to take clandestine lessons to learn how to ride it.
Sizzler later called me to ask me if I knew anybody who was good in
software graphics, someone who would be able to design solid
documents using the computer. He wanted to create all his
documents by himself to minimize the risk factor and keep the job
process entirely in‐house (The usual arrangement was to go to places
like Oluwole, Lagos to have any kind of document prepared). I had
just one person in mind and that was Silas but I wasn’t too sure of his
progress on the Corel Draw side of things so I told Sizzler I would look
around. I called Silas up the next morning and when he came around I
gave him a test, I gave him my original secondary school exams
certificate told him to produce an exact copy on the computer in
thirty minutes. Silas did better than that; he did it under twenty
minutes, all the time wondering what all this was about.
After that demonstration I told him I had a job for him and took him
to meet Sizzler with the document he had just created on the
computer. Sizzler was suitably impressed and proposed a deal on the
spot: working for Sizzler exclusively, Silas was to receive N10 000 for
each document he created. If religion is the opium of the masses, I
guess money is their cocaine. Silas accepted the offer. On days of
really heavy work, Silas was making about N80 000 for the high
quality documents he created. To put this figure in perspective,
factor that a typical bank worker was averaging N100 000 as monthly
salary.
After a week of working for Sizzler, Silas bought a new laptop
computer and installed on it the latest software graphics
applications, he also bought the latest HP color document printer.
Soon he had all sorts of documents on his laptop, ready for only
minor modifications and printing on Sizzler’s request.
As my work with Sizzler progressed, I learned from him more of the
skills that enabled him execute his scams with flawless delivery
including how to purposely include grammatical errors in scam
correspondence and during phone calls. This has the effect of making
the mugu assume he is on a higher intellectual pedestal and due to
that induced superiority complex, he’s further oblivious to the scam
being worked on him. To help my understanding of human psychology
and how to mine and exploit the weakness inherent in us all, he gave
me a book, it was titled “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene. I
was told to read up because the next job would be handled by me,
barely a week ahead. I devoured the book and pounced on the new
job with all eagerness. In my haste I hurried the job to a premature
conclusion and as a result I was able to get just $3 000 from the
woman.
Still Sizzler praised my courage for not shying away from a challenge,
he also said it was a good start for a rookie and suggested that I be
more patient. I wasn’t let of the hook just like that, he told me to
read the book again but this time I should look for the weaknesses in
myself that led me to bungle the job. It was a humbling but
strengthening exercise and at the end of it, I knew I was ready. I
watched Sizzler more closely, listened to his conversations with
clients (now called “mugus”) when I could and gradually my game
sharpened.
CHAPTER 2 ‐ FALL OUT
As my twentieth birthday approached, Sizzler made arrangements to
throw me a bash. We booked two halls at the new and posh Golden
Gate hotel for two nights; everything was done in doubles to coincide
with the number two. The roll call consisted of the top 419 chairmen
in Lagos, and I was introduced to them one by one with Sizzler
boasting to them that I was the engine that powered his new
“initiative”. In retrospect now I think that was what would later
unravel our relationship.
The last person that I was introduced to was Onome, someone whom
I had not heard of before and I noticed there was a kind of stiffness
between them. It seemed that all that held their reciprocated
animosity in check was a thin veil of civility. At the end of the party,
one of Onome’s boys carefully slipped me a note with a phone
number on it. I knew what was coming and I felt I could read Onome’s
moves, knowing that if he approached me himself right there it would
have amounted to a poke in Sizzler’s eyes.
I didn’t even think to find out what Onome had in mind for me by
giving me his direct line. I felt like the only thing I had on Sizzler was
his absolute belief in my loyalty and I wasn’t about to jeopardize that,
in any case not now that he was about to pay me the accumulated
percentage of my jobs with him plus the extra he had promised. So it
was a total shock to me when three days later I was woken up and
there was Onome at my door.
The man didn’t even ask to enter; he just walked in and asked me to
“close the door, thank you”. I was too amused to be annoyed by his
cockiness, and I was looking forward to parrying mentally with this
man who thought he could get me on his team by guile. His first
question got my attention one hundred percent: “so as you sharp
reach, you think say your percentage wey Fortune say him de keep for
you, him go pay you?” I was at first surprised that he knew about the
money Sizzler was keeping for me, but I was more worried that he
implied Sizzler used that as a ploy to keep from paying me my share
of the money. Before I could reply he told me “guy‐man wake up
before another guy‐man guy you” in essence he was saying “con‐man,
wise up before another con‐man cons you!” My brain had ceased to
function so I asked dumbly “wetin you mean?” to which he just told
me to watch out that six months from that day, Sizzler would still be
holding on to my money. He told me I would know what to do when
that happens and left without another word.
I continued to work with Sizzler without ever asking him to give me
my money even though he should have done that the moment I
turned twenty as per our agreement. I wasn’t even keen anymore to
get the extra he promised me, all I wanted was my rightful share.
Three months after Onome’s “prophesy” my resentment towards
Sizzler began to build as it dawned on me that Sizzler’s proposal that
I keep from touching my money was just another scam and his reason
that he wanted me to get more matured was the perfect story to
catch victim ‐ me. I could not believe that all the time I thought I was
scamming the white man mugu with Sizzler, he was scamming me too.
With that realization of what Sizzler was up to I decided to “prepare”
myself. Once I had made up my mind, the actual execution was easy
because I had been tutored by a master. I had all the contacts of the
current scams we were running, hell, I cultivated them myself and I
still had access to all the email accounts we used to process the
positive replies. I created a whole new set of email addresses all with
names very similar to the ones Sizzler was using. Then I went through
Sizzler’s accounts, forwarding all email to and from the victims to the
new accounts while making sure that nothing about my activities
would leave a trace. Once I had that done, at the end of each day, I
updated my cache of copied mails with the new ones from that day
for all email accounts. This was necessary incase Sizzler for any
reason had to delete any of the mails.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I asked Sizzler why he was delaying
with keeping his part of the bargain which was now five months
overdue. His reply was that he hadn’t brought the issue up because
he felt I still wasn’t mature enough to handle that much money. He
said “Trust me to look out for your interests”. Now to my notice, that
was his first ever slip up because that particular line was one he
always used to assure his scam victims, I had even learnt to use that
phrase myself to good effect. So for him to use that line on me meant
only one thing.
I made a call and I made my deal with Onome. If he wanted me to
come work for him he would pay me the total amount Sizzler owed
me, now standing at $92 000 (N11 960 000). In addition Onome would
have all the jobs Sizzler was working on. He accepted my terms.
Onome paid the total Dollar amount into the domiciliary bank
account I had just opened with a starting balance of $100. Once I
confirmed that the account had been funded I proceeded to gut
Sizzler. Using the new email accounts, I sent pre arranged emails to
all the contacts informing them of the discovery of a fraudster in our
agency who had swindled unsuspecting members of the public of
their hard earned money. I assured them that the man had been
arrested by the police and was awaiting trail now and advised them
not to accept calls or any form of correspondence from the man
known to them as Dr. Usman Bala (Sizzler’s scam identity), I supplied
the alternate email address and a new phone number. Next thing I did
was to change the passwords to all of Sizzler’s email accounts to
effectively shut him off all his present jobs. I provided Onome with all
the contacts and information I had harvested from Sizzler and guided
him on the tone of language and style that they were accustomed to.
I broke the news to Silas so he would know what had gone wrong so
as not to get caught in the crossfire. I let him understand that he was
under no obligation to me and that he could continue to work for
whomever he chose as long as he watched his back and made no deal
such as the one Sizzler used to sucker me in. Then I waited for
Sizzler’s response. I must admit that at first I was surprised that he
made no move to avenge my coup d'état but on second thoughts I
realized that being who he was, he probably reasoned that the money
he wouldn’t have to pay me could balance out the total money he
would have made from the lost jobs.
Onome would later ask me to set him up the way I had set Sizzler’s
operation up. The only difference was that this time I was to coach
his boys on my method. He was the first to go into “corporate 419”,
with an office complete with secretaries and accountants, the firm
which claimed to be into overseas marketing was mainly used as a
front. Onome also had five full time internet staff on a monthly
salary, their jobs were to scour the internet looking for email
addresses with software called “email spiders” which they sometimes
sold to other “19 boys” at a rate of N100 000 for twenty thousand
email addresses.
Now with the introduction of my blasting software to their operation,
they were also to send the emails for the scams I was to conceive.
Onome put me to oversee them and since I was to come up with the
scam ideas myself, I was also to handle the jobs myself once good
replies had come through. Thus I was in charge of our local
operations and Onome felt I had the experience not to need to be
supervised, I was to run the show as I deemed fit.
I remember the discussion I had with Onome over the sharing formula
to which our scam profits would be split, I told him that as men with
honor, whatever he felt reasonable would be fine with me. He
reminded me that even though modesty and loyalty got me into the
game, there was a time they could be set aside for me to “get mine”.
For example, my one‐upmanship on Sizzler. He also told me that for
one who had executed solo jobs and made good money as a result I
shouldn’t see him as a my “chairman” (boss) but as a partner in that
while I handled local jobs, he would handle the offshore apparatus. I
was to be the brains while he provided the power to run it, so we
settled for a 60/40 arrangement.
The first thing I modified was the email address sales idea. Previously
they sold thirty percent of the addresses they mined, leaving the
remaining for their own scams. I thought this was inefficient and
costly, for who knew how many addresses in the thirty percent that
would have made for good mugus. I thought it would be better if we
used all the email addresses we got then later sold them to others, a
sort of “recycling”. I introduced a time schedule system such that we
mined addresses two months in advance, as a result, email addresses
we had minded and used to blast could be sold two months later
when we would have finished working on the good replies from that
batch.
Then a further modification was that we kept a list of all email
addresses that we confirmed “alive”, this means addresses that were
not unreachable, over quota, or gave any kind of error message other
than “message delivered and received”. This list which we called the
“A list” became a sought‐after item and chairmen and jobbies
worldwide were willing to pay $2 000 for each set of twenty thousand
email addresses.
The flip side to this was that those email addresses became more
increasingly bombarded with all sorts of “formats” and this got worse
as the addresses were bought and resold. The men who bought from
us direct usually had the best of the remnants since replies were
always guaranteed. Personally I never reused email addresses we had
blasted with whether “alive” or not on Onome’s operations.
You must understand that I didn’t profit from the email sales arm of
Onome’s business because my deal with him only covered profits
from scam deals I had executed so he was really happy that I was able
to open up a fresh and steady income stream for him. The profit from
my remodeling of his email operation was almost at ten million Naira
in the first six months and that paid him back the bulk of his initial
investment to bring me in from Sizzler. In gratitude the man gave me
the keys to a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser Prado. Before I get
ahead of myself, let me tell you a bit about “Mega Chairman” Onome.
ONOME
As a young man growing up in Delta state, Nigeria, Onome was never
unsure of his direction. He knew where he was coming from and
where he was going to. He had been raised as a single child to a
constable in the Nigerian police who was originally from the northern
part of the old Bendel state (which was divided to form Delta and Edo
states). His father Philip Osaro was transferred to the Asaba division
of the police and there he met and later impregnated a local girl out
of wedlock. Philip made up his mind to marry the girl once she
delivered the baby she carried because he felt it was the proper thing
to do to give back to the girl some of the dignity she had lost when
she got pregnant for him out of wedlock.
The new born baby was born a hefty 5kg and it seemed that for him
to come into this earth, someone had to go, so it was that his size
made for a difficult delivery for the young girl. She died after
childbirth and the boy was named Onome after his mother (Onome is
a unisex name).
His father was never the marrying type who felt that no woman in her
right senses should marry a policeman who would be posted and
reposted all across the country, making a mess of her life and the life
of the children. He trained his son alone with the only wife he knew:
the police force. Thus Onome grew up idolizing his father and wanting
to become a policeman when he grew up. The same year the young
man finished secondary school he signed up at the police academy in
Lagos. He turned out to be the perfect cadet, strong physically and
sound mentally, to complete the two year course at the top of his
batch.
At the end of the course he received his assignment letter and was
disappointed when he found he was posted to the Lagos force
headquarters as an orderly to the Assistant Commissioner of Police –
he had wanted to be posted somewhere where real down‐to‐earth
police action took place, like Asaba. His father was quite surprised at
the stupid young man for wanting to be posted to a backwater
location such as Asaba, so he explained to him why the headquarters
was a posting to be celebrated since all the action took place there
and a smart young man could do well to take the opportunity and
make the most of it. Besides, he continued, Onome had only himself
to blame for getting posted to the headquarters since only the best
cadets were sent there.
At the headquarters, the former cadet soon impressed the ACP by his
quick wit and bearing. It was as if the young man was born a
policeman. His uniform was always impeccable and he needed little
supervision on any task he was assigned to. A year and four months
into his posting, Onome was given the role of aid de camp to the
commissioner. It was in this capacity three years later that he would
meet a young guy‐man and that event would change his life forever.
He had just concluded a one year diploma course on “Law and the
Police” at the University of Lagos when a case came to the attention
of his boss, the assistant commissioner. The case was one of forgery
and impersonation that a certain Lagos businessman and oil mogul
brought against a man who had claimed to be a staff of the NNPC. The
“NNPC man” had turned out to be one Mr. Fortune Ikechi who had
been dismissed from the oil corporation two years back for
“negligence of duty and flouting accounting procedure”. The man had
used his knowledge of the NNPC to front as an official in the oil block
management department of the corporation and with that, awarded
the businessman the fictitious oil block lease “BDW 530” for a tenure
of ten years.
The business man had been charged a total of $15 850 for
registration and other administrative costs to get the oil block but
when the process was taking longer than he expected, he got
suspicious and made some discreet enquiries at the NNPC. The
moment his fears were confirmed, businessman took the case to the
assistant commissioner of police who was his friend and a member of
his lawn tennis club. The policeman assured his friend that the case
was an open and shut one, that he should consider the imposter
finished and to give him two weeks to have his money back.
The police quickly built up a case against Fortune Ikechi with the
documents the businessman had provided and within one week
Fortune was arrested but to the ACP’s utter embarrassment, word
came from “above” that investigative proceedings against a Mr.
Fortune Ikechi should be suspended and he should be released. The
principals in the case were called to a meeting at the office of the
Commissioner of Police. Onome’s oga was white hot with rage
“What!” he screamed, “is this world coming to, when thieves and
criminal are called to a meeting to resolve their “differences” with
those they’ve robbed?”
It was the morning of this meeting that Onome met Fortune, he was
at his office desk next to the office of the ACP when an expensively
dressed young man walked up to him and addressed him with barely
concealed contempt “your oga dey inside?” he asked. Even without
the courtesy of a greeting, the pompous fool dared address him in
Pidgin English like he was a bum from the streets. Onome slowly
stood up to intimidate this bloody civilian with his imposing height
and presence but the man wasn’t impressed, instead he looked at his
gold watch impatiently and with measured slowness repeated the
question like Onome was a half‐wit. In reply Onome asked him “who
are you and where are you from?” to which the man answered hotly
“listen boy, I was making money when your father was still eating
beans! I’m here to see the ACP and if he is not around you say so
instead of keeping me here with your stupid questions!” Onome’s
brain exploded and he grabbed the bastard’s throat and was well on
his way to strangling him to death when the ACP burst out of his
office to pull him off the man.
The way the Commissioner went about handling the case left a bitter
taste in Onome’s mouth, he reconciled the two men with Fortune
paying back the entire amount after the businessman agreed not to
press the matter further. Onome would later ask the ACP why the
man was let of the hook even with all the evidence they had against
him, the ACP would tell him that he should let the matter go, that if
he hanged on long enough in the force he would understand the
“system”.
But Onome would not let it go because the matter had gone beyond a
policeman just wanting to perform the duty he had sworn to perform.
It had become a personal matter because not only had Fortune
insulted him, he had also insulted his father. He could over look being
kept from police duty, he could even forget a personal insult but what
he could never do was forgive an insult to his father to his face. So he
put the underrated but still effective police grapevine to work finding
out all he could about Fortune “Sizzler” Ikechi.
After a week he had his information, he knew Sizzler’s sources of
income, his influence in the Nigerian police, his known friends and
enemies. With this information in his hands, he could undermine
Sizzler anytime he wanted but he knew that the police wasn’t the way
since the man was too connected for a framing job to stick. He also
knew that he didn’t want him dead in the physical sense so that left
just one option and the more he thought of it, the more it appealed
to him. The man’s last statement to him made it all clear how he
would have his revenge; he would beat the fool on his own territory
by first overtaking him in the one thing he thought he had which was
money then slowly undermining his 419 operations till he went
bankrupt. Then the coup de grace, the finish move would be to send
him a bag of beans.
Onome set out to start his own 419 venture. He already had access to
all kinds of scam documents which the police had retrieved from
several arrests of local 19 boys, he also knew the law process better
than most. He then proceeded to recruit boys from the neighborhood
who knew how to use the computer who would be blasting for him
from cyber cafés. Whenever police raids were about happen, he
would alert his boys in time for them to vacate the targeted cyber
café. The replies that came through he handled himself until he got
the hang of it such that soon he was making good money from scam.
The money was not coming in with the speed and volume he wanted
so he used the money he had got to rent an office and equip it with
computers and an internet connection. He then resigned from the
police to go into full time scam but he still needed his police links
because the information they provided him with always kept him one
step ahead of the others. Soon with these advantages and his
corporate 419 approach in addition to the hatred for Fortune fueling
him on, he soon catapulted to the upper strata of job‐men in Lagos.
The speed with which Onome rose in the 419 world was a source of
embarrassment to the “establishment” which was an informal group
of the most successful and influential job‐men. They couldn’t
understand how a common askari (policeman) could come into their
fold to rub shoulders with them. Some even started the rumor that
there was a Baba in Edo state that supplied him with Bendel
Insurance which gave him spiritual powers of persuasion such that
any mugu he talked to on the phone paid up whatever amount he
specified. The true reason I believe is that Onome who had a practical
understanding of the criminal mind also had the benefit of knowing
the rules that governed both sides of law. That he wasn’t accepted by
others didn’t bother him one bit, he didn’t need their company or
approval for anything he did anyway.
It had taken him the greater part of seven years to catch up with
Sizzler but by then he had started to question himself on his true
motive for taking the path he walked now, was it truly because of
Sizzler’s disrespect of his father or something else? Till the elder
Osaro died later that year, Onome never told him the true reason why
he left the force and he was beginning to wonder what the old man
would say of him if he could see him now. He knew the thought only
infuriated him the more.
RETRIBUTION
Onome’s first move to undermine Sizzler was to get me from him; the
jobs I brought with me were just fringe benefits he didn’t mind
getting. With my understanding of the history between the two men,
I realized the true reason why Sizzler didn’t come after me after my
“Judas” move on him. The next move was to have an inside person to
open a backdoor into Sizzler’s operations. Here Onome used his
experience in the police force to recruit one of Sizzler’s new boys to
become a mole. The young man was greedy and ambitious and those
were the traits we exploited to turn him. We promised him fifty
percent of the profits of the “project”. All the boy was to do was to
install a key logging software I had picked up on the internet on
Sizzler’s computers including the man’s personal laptops.
The software which was disguised as a picture file was so small that
its operation on the host computer was imperceptible, all one had to
do to install it was to double click on it. Like a computer virus, it gave
no indication to alert one about its activation. Its function was to
record all the keystrokes made on its host’s keyboard then send the
information to an email address provided by the installer.
The boy quickly deployed it on all Sizzler’s desktop computers and
another laptop they used when on the move but Sizzler’s personal
laptop was beyond access (Sizzler had decided to “compartmentalize”
his operations after my exit). The boy came up with an ingenious way
for Sizzler to do the work for him. He waited until Sizzler gave him his
flash drive to copy a scanned document from one of the other
desktop computers. The boy promptly copied the key logger and
renamed it with the name of the file Sizzler intended.
All Sizzler noticed when he tried to view the file was that the image
didn’t show so he asked the boy to copy the file again since the first
copy was corrupted, and so Sizzler never knew how he opened the
door to destruction on himself.
The first fruits our key‐logger bore was information on the usernames
and passwords to all the email accounts he used on his current scams
but the jackpot was internet log in and access codes to the two
offshore bank accounts Sizzler used as a hoard for the all money he
had scammed from his victims. When Onome was about to access
those accounts, I advised him to use a free service on the internet
that helped one anonymously browse the net with a
masked/substituted IP address. This made any transactions from that
person’s computer system untraceable.
Onome applied the idea and after that the first thing he did was to
adjust the account settings of the online bank accounts that made the
bank verify with the owner of the accounts if there was any move to
transfer funds out of the accounts. Here he supplied a different
confirmation number (his own) that the bank would contact in that
event. Then he later initiated a non‐reversible cash movement
command on the accounts into his own, the confirmation call came
barely five minutes later through which he authorized the movement
of a total of $68 000 000 from the accounts.
Our mole didn’t report any change in Sizzler’s behavior for the next
one week but in the weekend to follow, he told us he noticed the man
was very irritable and from then on it only got worse. The boy could
only wonder on what it was that we had done to get to him. Onome
gradually infiltrated all of Sizzler’s scam victims and blew the whistle
on each one.
Sizzler went about his legitimate business grooming new contacts for
new scams but his suspicion arose when the same fate befell them
too. By the end of the sixth month with not a single Dollar earned
from his enterprise, the man went absolutely paranoid. He changed
all his phone numbers and fired his entire staff including our mole
who threatened us to pay up or he would come clean to Sizzler about
his role in Sizzler’s problems. Onome just told him that he should
have patience, that his money would come when the project was
complete but that if he insisted that he would go to Sizzler with what
he knew he would do well to remember that Sizzler would surely kill
him after his confession.
The final nail in Sizzler’s coffin was his attachment to the expensive
lifestyle he had lived which he strove to maintain so that no one
would notice the extent of his problems. He employed two new staff
to run his home based scam business but the situation only worsened.
Rumor even had it that he went as far as going to a “white garment”
church to be delivered from evil and negative spirits, there he was
told that his problem was his wife who was a witch. He sent the poor
lady packing and burnt all her belongings, he then moved out from
the house they had shared for nine years.
Sizzler started to secretly sell off his landed properties and used the
money to maintain this lifestyle even as his business didn’t improve.
Such was the extent of the man’s wealth that it took Onome the
greater part of three years to totally ground Sizzler by end of which
time the man had to take up residence at his younger brother’s house
where Frank was magnanimous enough to let him have a room for
shelter. Sizzler refused to he humbled and tried to revive his lifestyle
from under his brother’s roof and this eventually led to a fall out
between them.
His brother would later kick him out and he had to squat at a friend’s
house at Victoria Island, this was where he was holed up working on
his laptop when a knock came at the door. He would open the door to
find in front of him a bag of red beans. With the revelation of the
cause of his fall, he would later explain to a friend that Onome had
used jazz (Juju, black magic) on him and that was why he never
recovered.
CHAPTER 3 ‐ JOBS
“NEXT‐OF‐KIN” JAMES MACAFEE III, FLORIDA ‐ USA
After the time Onome concentrated all his attention on Sizzler we
worked together on several jobs but the first big one we executed
together was a next‐of‐kin scam on James Macafee III who was a
thirty‐seven year old mutual funds manager working and living in
Florida, USA. You see, I love the “next‐of‐kin” jobs because of the
psychological nature of the scam. It plays on some of the most
powerful and irresistible of human frailties like greed and deceit
(…wow let me get this money before these people realize I’m not the
true beneficiary). Over confidence (…these Africans are so dumb, see
how this fool is about to pay me such an amount of money just
because I have the same name with the real beneficiary of this
money!). And vanity (…I always felt like I have rich relatives all
around the world, see now, one of them has made me the sole heir of
his wealth ‐ Now I can live the rich life I was born to live!). As such it
is quite hard for the mugu to stop to think rationally. With thoughts
like these running through the head of the “client” you don’t need to
do that much to keep him/her paying up.
My “friend” James Macafee told me that he had lived his entire life in
the Daytona Beach area of Florida, he had only moved to Miami to
work as a mutual fund manager in an asset management firm after his
university education. Another reason why his case is so memorable
was that of all the replies I have ever received from blasting emails
with next‐of‐kin formats, he was the only one who actually claimed
he had a relative in Africa whom he had lost touch with for a long
time. He was not only accepting the information, he was claiming a
right to the money straight out! Usually we had to convince our
respondents that there was no mistake and yes, this money was truly
theirs.
His was a criminal mind at work and it made bleeding him a lot more
fun because he actually thought he was conning us. With this
advantage he gave me I could give him any “bill” and he would pay up
instead of objecting and making himself a liar and look stupid since
he should have know the procedure for a next‐of‐kin claim
settlement. I didn’t even bother so send him a “process timeline” as I
should have because when I asked him he claimed he knew how the
entire process went.
The first bill I would give him was a registration charge of $15 000
and like a dream, the man paid the money and by the time I would
take him to the “shock stage” he had coughed up $45 000 in total. By
that time I told him I had discovered a mistake that he wasn’t the real
James Macafee I was to give the money he was frantic and confessed
that he had misled me before and as such had emptied his life savings
to pay the charges I gave him. He asked me if there was anything I
could do and I told him that I could substitute his data for the real
one in our records but that it was going to cost him a lot of money
because I had to bribe a lot of people. I billed him $120 000 and he
accepted. In fact he was so grateful and promised to give me a
present at the end of the whole process if I could pull it off.
I was to learn later that he liquidated all the stocks he was managing
and paid the money into the domiciliary account I had opened just for
his money. I guess he believed that before anyone would notice the
missing stocks, he would have gotten his $10 000 000 “inheritance”
from Africa and repurchased them. I almost felt sorry for him but he
had it coming.
At the closure of this particular scam we had netted about $165 000.
“DIAMONDS TRANSFER” JOSELUIS GARCIA, BERN ‐
SWITZERLAND
This operation is one I remember rather well because it was the best
paying scam job I ever received and took over from a “catcher”. All
the other catcher jobs I accepted were not that well paying for one
reason or the other. After a while I started to believe that they were
simply jinxed because the owners just had bad luck. I stopped
receiving jobs from outside after the fourth one collapsed
mysteriously. One day I’m conversing nicely with the victim, leading
him on to the first payment, the next day he is cursing me off with
emails containing terms like ”asshole” and “thief”.
I received the job details from a smalltime 19 hustler from Edo state
called Champion who told me that he had received a positive reply
from one JoseLuis Garcia to whom he had sent a “Charles Taylor”
format. JoseLuis Garcia was a forty‐one year old career diplomat from
Portugal who at that time had just been posted to the Portuguese
embassy in Bern, Switzerland. He was married with one daughter and
had just moved his family down to stay with him at his new post.
The format Champion used was a variant of one I had used before. In
his format, the guy‐man claims to be Darlington Diboh, a personal
aide and former bodyguard to Charles Taylor, the former Liberian
president who was currently seeking political asylum in Nigeria. The
former rebel leader having set himself up in opulence in Calabar, the
capital of Cross River state (south‐east Nigeria), was frequently
sending Diboh to make payments for his many luxuries (including
bribes to government officials for special favors) on his behalf. The
mugu is told that Taylor usually made his payments using diamonds
he acquired through his diamond trafficking operation during the
conflict in Sierra Leone.
To further convince the victim, online news reports about Taylor’s
asylum in Nigeria would be cited. In continuation, the victim is told
that I (Diboh) had been siphoning some of the gem stones worth
about $8 000 000 for myself and had them stored in a safety deposit
box in a Nigerian bank (backed up with a picture of stones of
different colors and sizes in a small metal box). The victim is told he
is needed to help transfer the gems out of the country and that after
the safe transfer and sale of the gems he would be paid 30% of their
street value. He is also made to understand that Diboh had to be very
cautious on such a dangerous move to sell the diamonds and that the
transfer had to be kept highly secret. This was because Taylor had
people in Nigeria on his payroll who would report back to him if
Diboh’s secret cache was discovered and if that happened, both the
transfer and Diboh’s life were forfeit.
Champion had already “confirmed” the mugu by having him send in
his personal and financial details plus a copy of his diplomatic
passport so the first mail I sent to “Mr. Diplomat” was the one I used
to give him his first “bill”. This was a charge to register his details
with the bank plus the fees for initiating an assets transfer process
and the total cost was $5 000. I remember a moment of worry after
that email because it was sent on a Friday and throughout that
weekend I didn’t hear a word from JoseLuis Garcia.
I was about to write the job off as another belly‐up operation when
the first thing the following Monday morning I got his reply and he
was explaining that the embassy had had an impromptu security audit
so he was out of all electronic reach for the entire weekend. He then
asked me to see if there was any way the charges could be reduced
because he didn’t have that much cash right now, I replied two hours
later to say I would talk to the bank manager who was a friend of
mine to see what could be done.
I would call his home number later that day to tell him that my friend
at the bank had agreed to temporarily waive $1 000 off the normal
fees but that we would have to pay it in once the process was
concluded and we had the stones out of the country. JoseLuis Garcia
was thrilled and promised to make the payment the next day. I had
already provided him with details of how to make the payment by
Western Union money transfer so by noon the next day one of
Onome’s boys went and collected the money.
When I saw that this contact was “correct”, I called Champion and
made him a deal. I offered him $5 000 as a once and for all payment
for the job telling him that if he declined that amount and the mugu
didn’t bring in good money at the end of the job, he would end up
with much less. With the money right there in front of him, it took
Champion about three seconds to make up his mind and grab the
bundle of fresh $100 notes. I guess that’s why he stayed smalltime
and it explained why he couldn’t execute his jobs by himself because
if he had stopped his greedy mind long enough to consider things, he
would have realized that his normal cut of 50% of the job would have
given him at least $10 000 at closure. I still wonder how he got the
nickname “Champion” because I could see nothing in him that made
him a winner.
I promptly had documents prepared for a Mr. JoseLuis Garcia to show
him that he was duly registered at the bank. One was an asset
transfer certificate and another, a receipt from the bank showing the
paid‐in amount to be $4 000 with a handwritten section saying that
there was a balance of $1 000 to be paid at the close of the transfer.
The documents were bound and sent by FedEx courier to him. Four
days later he confirmed receipt of the documents and was very
pleased with our “progress” so far.
I took him into the shock phase by telling him that the Central Bank
of Nigeria had imposed new regulations on the transfer of valuable
assets like precious stones. I explained to him that the reason was
that many of the people who profited from the illegal diamond trade
in Africa were using Nigerian banks to send those stones out to
Europe. That from immediate effect all such transfers could be made
only into foreign accounts of firms with legal representation by a
reputable Nigerian law firm and also maintained a domiciliary account
funded to the tune of $200 000 with the initiating local bank. I
advised him that proper legal representation would cost about $40
000 to $50 000 for such a deal.
If “Mr. Diplomat” was upset or surprised, I never found out. He just
instructed me to see how I could reduce those new charges
drastically to something he could afford. To this I told him that the
amount for the domiciliary account was set by the CBN and was non‐
negotiable but that I would see what I could do about getting a
cheaper alternative for the issue of a legal representative. Five days
would pass before I “found” the law firm of Ochala Michael Chambers
who had agreed to represent Mr. JoseLuis Garcia for $35 000. I told
him that the firm only accepted to represent him because his
diplomatic status made them feel he was above board in character
and his link may be beneficial to them in the future.
It took the diplomat about one week to get the money and send it to
us but by then he was already complaining to me that he didn’t have
$200 000 for opening the domiciliary account. I encouraged him by
asking him if he could raise the balance of the amount if I came up
with $45 000 by selling my house in Calabar. He told me he was
moved by my sincerity and determination to make the transfer go
through and agreed to come up with the balance of $155 000. He
however told me he would send me the money in batches as the
funds came to him from his personal savings, selling his stocks and
liquidating the educational trust he had kept for his child(ren). Also,
he felt it could raise some eyebrows if he accumulated and then
moved such an amount in bulk out of his account.
After about three months on the JoseLuis Garcia runs, I had extracted
a total of $194 000 from him.
“INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY” MELISSA DULLES, TEXAS ‐ USA
This scam I am about to describe to you now is the one I call “the
mother of all scams” because it brought us the biggest payoff of any
job I worked on. It is the job that took me the longest time to execute
mostly for two reasons, first was the time it took me to find the right
“candidate” and second, I had to combine two different scams to pull
it off. I will make this clearer later on.
I found Melissa Dulles on a free online dating service after months of
searching for someone fitting her profile. I had gone on the internet
searching for the surnames of oil families from Texas which were
several, after that I narrowed the list to those families with single
and young females. After that, I further whittled down the list by
filtering out those who had not reached twenty‐one years of age and
those who had crossed thirty‐five. That left just two names on the
list: Melissa Dulles, 25, Dallas TX and Joanna Speers, 34, Arlington TX.
I decided against the older woman because she was more likely to be
difficult to convince plus she had been married and had two grown up
kids.
My decision made, I went to all the known dating sites and searched
for a Melissa Dulles (of which there were many in the US) until I
found her. Her ID on the site was melly_doll55 (as well as her Yahoo
email address) and her personal information on her profile page
confirmed her to be just what I wanted. I was looking for a white girl
of average intelligence who was into pop music (she was a fan of
Britney Spears) and searching for a serious relationship. I wanted an
American air‐head because the scam would first start in a “come and
marry” format so I needed her to be impressionable.
I opened a new email address with the name
adebayor_paul2k@yahoo.com and with it came a Yahoo messenger ID
adebayor_paul2k which I set up and added melly_doll55 to the
“friends” list. I made the contact and we started chatting. I presented
myself as Paul Olabayor, son of General Bayo Olabayor of the
Nigerian army. I claimed to be twenty‐seven years of age and a
master’s degree holder in Economics. I also sent pictures of myself
with my bike to Melissa and she was hooked. I gallantly proceeded to
win her heart by composing love poems to her daily and sending her
African objet d'art like beads and solid gold ornaments from northern
Nigeria. Two months later I told Melissa I was in love with her and
would love to marry her, I asked her if she would love to come to
Nigeria on an all‐expense paid visit and she said yes.
I gave Melissa guidelines to the process to get necessary travel
papers to Nigeria and a week later she was in Nigeria. Before she
came in I had made all the necessary arrangements for her stay – I
booked a weeklong stay in a presidential suite at the Abuja Hilton,
reserved a limousine service for that same duration and also for two
military escorts. I received her at the Abuja airport with one of the
escorts then we drove her to the hotel. I made sure that she got a
first‐class treat during her stay, both in the bedroom and outside. I
kept Melissa guessing on what was coming next, we visited famous
spots in northern Nigeria, enjoyed the night life of Abuja together
and even went on a shopping spree in Lagos. I wanted her suitably
overwhelmed and speechless enough that by the time I popped the
question, there would be no doubts in her mind. The poor girl had no
real chance to resist.
On the Thursday after her arrival I presented Melissa with a diamond
engagement ring and asked her to marry me. She broke down and
tearfully accepted. I took her home to meet my “father” (a retired
soldier I had paid N40 000 to play the role while the house was
Onome’s villa at Abuja). I had made arrangements for more military
escorts and aides to be situated within and around the house. My
“father” gave his blessings to the marriage and we staged a court
wedding for her benefit after which we were later presented with
authentic‐looking marriage certificates. My father told us that since
we were now married, we should move in together and occupy one
wing of the mansion until we had our own place, he decreed that no
daughter‐in‐law of his would stay in a hotel room not while he had
such a big house. Five days later Melissa returned to the States after
we had agreed that I was to go over in two week’s time to meet her
folks and make arrangements for the wedding reception.
Melissa had barely settled in from her return trip when I hit her with
the second “format” of the job. I called her to say that my father had
just given me some bad news that Nigeria was about to witness
another coup d’état and that his sources in the military had revealed
to him that his name was on the list of those to be eliminated due to
his loyalty to the present Head of State. I told her that he had stashed
away $100 000 000 in a Nigerian bank and had instructed me to look
for a way to get it out of the country without arousing suspicion, that
he was even willing to part with half of the money to make sure he
wasn’t penniless after he had made his way out of the country.
I told Melissa that I had no one to turn to so that was why I was
telling her all that but that I had a plan: she would front as an
American contact who would present himself to help my father move
the money out. Then by the time we had safely gotten the money out
of the country, we would have $50 000 000 to ourselves. We could
then live the rest of our lives together in the lap of luxury. Initially
Melissa was shocked that I was planning to swindle my own father at
such a time but I told her that it was providence that brought such a
chance to us, that even if we didn’t do it, someone else would
eventually get that money. I told her to see the fact that such a thing
came up just after we got married as a sign from God ‐ it was
probably a “divine” wedding gift. I worked on her for three days
before the crook in her was awakened.
I asked her to send a mail to my father at genb_olabayor@yahoo.com
and to use the information I had already prepared and forwarded to
her email address earlier in the day. In the email I sent to Melissa
enclosed was another message that introduced the sender as Mr.
Walter Steels, a stockbroker in New York who was approached by a
Mr. Paul Olabayor, a Nigerian citizen who proposed a business deal
whereby he (Mr. Steels) would help the mail recipient (General
Olabayor) move out a sum of $100 000 000 from Nigeria and invest
the said sum in the New York stock exchange. In return for that
service, Mr. Steels was to be paid fifty percent of the money. The
sender then asked the receiver to confirm that he did instruct a Paul
Olabayor to make such a contact on his behalf and to show proof that
he is indeed General Olabayor by sending a scanned copy of his
international passport and then to enclose proof of the existence of
the money to show that this wasn’t a scam. I told her to open an
email address with the name Walter Steels and to leave all else to me
to handle from there.
Melissa created the account as waltersteels15@hotmail.com and an
hour after she sent the email containing the story I gave to her to
genb_olabayor@yahoo.com, I sent a reply via the same address
confirming that I was General Olabayor of the Nigerian army and that
Paul Olabayor was my son whom I authorized to carry out the
transaction on my behalf since it would cause suspicion in the army if
I handled it myself. I then enclosed an international passport with the
name and containing the picture of my rented father with a
statement of account for a domiciliary account in a Nigerian bank
showing the current account balance to be $100 054 000. I then told
“Mr. Steels” that any further correspondence on the transaction
should be sent to Paul’s email address
(adebayor_paul2k@yahoo.com) since he would be handling
everything from that point onwards.
I told Melissa we had to keep up appearances in case my father
decided to check up on how I was doing on the transaction at
anytime. So we kept sending these fictitious mails back and forth
between waltersteels15@hotmail and adebayor_paul2k@yahoo.com
while I called her on phone to “secretly” provide her with the next
instructions. So the process went thus:
1. Melissa opens email account for Walter Steels and as “Mr.
Steels”, contacts General Olabayor via email. Asks for proof of
identity and existence of money.
2. “General Olabayor” replies with confirmation and proof,
authorizes and hands over to “son” Paul Olabayor.
3. “Steels” contacts Paul to say confirmation was received from
General Olabayor, asks what next
4. Paul replies “Steels” to say “Steels” should provide financial
data like bank coordinates of account that will receive the
money from Nigeria.
5. “Steels” sends reply with original social security number
(Melissa’s) and bank account information (also Melissa’s).
6. Paul sends reply to say account details received, “Steels” is told
to standby for cash transfer in the next twenty‐four hours.
The reason I took this circuitous track was twofold – firstly, to get
Melissa all caught up and involved in the conspiracy and secondly to
give her indirect proof of the existence of the money.
I then called up Melissa on phone to tell her that I had given my
father the banking information she had provided as Mr. Steels, she
was to call me the moment she confirmed that the money had
reflected in her account. I would call her eight hours later to ask if
the transfer had been done, she said it hadn’t and I then told her I
was worried because I had not heard from my father since he left to
go to the bank to initiate the transfer that morning. I asked Melissa
to standby while I made some calls to ascertain what was going on.
I call her up not quite two hours later to tell her that my father’s
trusted aide de camp had come to our house with some very bad
news that my father had been accosted by some soldiers on his way
from the bank where he had gone to start the transfer process. The
ADC said my father had been going to his office to get some needed
paperwork to complete the transfer when the men stopped him and
took him away. That the ADC further revealed that my father had
later made a deal with the men (who he believed tobe the coup
plotters) that if he gave them $6 000 000 and promised to leave the
country immediately, they would let him live. That when I asked the
ADC why my father was sending him when he could easily get the
money himself, he replied that the men told my father to send
someone to get the money on his behalf because they couldn’t take
the risk of letting him leave to get the money himself and that the
men threatened to kill my father in three day’s time if the money
didn’t come.
So my father sent him to me because he didn’t know who to trust and
he didn’t want to have to explain to anybody why he needed that kind
of money right away and why he didn’t come for it in person. Melissa
asked me if I had the money to help my father and I said all I had was
$1 000 000 my father had given me a month earlier to purchase some
property for him in the US. She then asked me why I couldn’t
approach the bank to cancel the transfer process myself and get the
money from there. To this I answered that such a transfer could not
be cancelled by anyone other than the account owner and that my
father didn’t want the men holding him to know he was in the process
of moving such a huge amount out of the country because then they
would surely ask for a much larger ransom (if not the entire money).
And there was no way he could give me the necessary authorization
for the bank to cancel the transfer without the men finding out.
At that point I was already sounding desperate and hopelessly lost so
as to move her to make the big suggestion herself. She did just that
and till today no other sentence has ever sounded sweeter than
hearing her ask “Baby, if I raised the money, would you be able to get
it to those men in three days time?” At this point I waited for just the
right amount of time before I dismissed her by saying “oh girl, don’t
be silly! Where are you gonna get $5 000 000 from? Besides that, it
would still take about five working days to effect such a transfer
through the banks wire system.”, she said I shouldn’t worry about the
money, that she would get the money but then I would have to make
arrangements to get the money from the States myself.
I still insisted that she should tell me how she planned to get the
money because I didn’t want her to do anything illegal and as far as I
knew, she didn’t have such money anywhere. In reply to this, she now
told me about her family explaining that she didn’t reveal any of it
before because she wanted to be sure I loved her for herself and not
because of her family background.
I assured her I had had no way of knowing about her background so
there was no way I would have married her for her money. I promised
her that she would have her money back before the week was over,
then it was her turn to tell me I was being silly because she was doing
all of that because I was her husband and there was no need to pay
her back since the money would be ours eventually anyway.
Once I had gotten Melissa to commit herself, all that remained was to
take the necessary steps to bring in the money. So I told her that I
was sending my father’s trusted ADC to the States to receive the
money from her on my behalf. She asked me if I trusted the man
myself and I said absolutely, explaining to her how the man had been
with my father since I was a little boy and he was my father’s
confidante.
I gave Melissa the name of one of Onome’s couriers who was based in
the US, I also sent a copy of the man’s picture for identification and
instructed her to make the payment only when the person presented
proper identification. She was also to call me for confirmation the
moment she was about to hand over the money. She said it would
take her till the next morning to have the money since it was already
too late to do anything that day. I replied that the man had left to the
airport to take the next flight to the US, that he would be in Texas in
ten hours or so.
About twelve hours later Melissa called me to tell me that she was on
the way to the bank, that in another two hours she would have the
money ready. At this point Onome’s man was already in place, the
rendezvous point being a shopping mall directly opposite the bank
she used in Texas. Exactly one hour and thirty‐five minutes later she
called me back to say that she had seen the man but that to be sure, I
should call the man immediately and tell him to raise his two hands
as a signal that he was really the ADC. Later on the courier would
explain to us that the transfer went through without any incident and
he took a straight flight back to Nigeria with the money.
The moment the money came home to us, I set about dismantling the
tools of trade I had used to pull off this scam. The phone numbers,
email addresses (both “real” and fake) were all closed down. The last
contact I would have with Melissa Dulles was a phone call to tell her
that I was on the way to deliver the $6 000 000 to the coup plotters
who had abducted my father. I told her to keep calling me on
intervals of thirty minutes to be sure that I was alright. After the
second call from her I pulled out the SIM card from the phone and
crushed it. That night we partied hard to celebrate the haul in.
Total expenditure I made on this scam was approximately N1 500 000.
Total windfall from her: $5 000 000.
Some months later, Onome’s courier sent him a mail to say that he
would have to leave the states for good because there was an
ongoing investigation of an unpleasant incident which had made
sensational news nationwide in the US. He didn’t want to be there
when investigators probing the circumstances that led to the suicide
of one Mellisa Dulles, came calling. She had left a note with just “Paul
Olabayor” written on it and the FBI had come into the case after it
was established that she had just come back from a trip to Nigeria.
I felt a little sad for her but the story of civilization is filled with
examples of people like her – weaklings who end up as fodder for the
powerful and get trampled as mankind marches on.
CHAPTER 4 ‐ WOMEN
By the time I was working on Melissa Dulles, I had already moved into
my own apartment at Victoria Island which I had purchased at a cost
of N3 000 000 cash. But can you imagine that seven months after
Onome gave me the car, I still couldn’t drive it home for fear of what
my father would say. Relations between me and my dad had gone
somewhat cold after he confronted me with the information that he
had learned that I was always in the company of fraudsters. He
threatened to disown me if I brought shame to his name by my
activities or if the police ever came knocking on his door to look for
me for any reason. I told him that I was old enough to take care of
myself and I didn’t need him to be threatening me for that matter.
The next morning, I took a few clothes in a bag, jumped on my bike
and took off. I stayed in a hotel for two weeks before I acquired the
flat.
At that time I found another of Robert Green’s books, this one titled
“The Art of Seduction” and I remember the advice in the early pages
of the book that suggested I keep morality aside if I wanted to reap
real dividends from the book. I heeded those words.
I have always had these ideas about women, you may choose to agree
or disagree with me, I’m not claiming any great expertise in this
matter. You see love for women and conquest of women are one and
the same thing, if you want a woman you should employ all the
weapons in your arsenal to conquer her. It is only after that conquest
that you may lay claim to her love or profess your love for her with a
good degree of assurance, anything other than that my friend, is
living in fool’s paradise.
I also believe conquest of a woman is won on two fronts – that of her
body and that of her mind. You can own her body but never own her
mind but if you own her mind, you also own her body automatically.
For example, owning her body alone can be likened to a situation
where a rich man picks any girl on the street, dusts her up and makes
her a wife in less than a month. Here she becomes like another of his
prized possessions. In such a relationship, the woman can up and
elope with any young man who she happens to develop real feelings
for.
On the other hand owning a woman’s mind can be likened to a
situation where a man uses those intangible elements he possesses
like his personality, will and affection to totally stamp his sign all
over a woman’s consciousness. In such a situation the woman can
become a tool for the man’s every wish and never want for any other.
A good example of this kind of relationship is that of the “Iceberg”
Slims of this world and their ladies. Such relationships are baffling
because one can’t really say why the women stay on even though
they know they are being used only for monetary gains. Of course the
lady might tell you she’s doing it for the love but give me a break
here, let’s all be scientists for a moment and agree that the feeling of
being “in love” is physiologically replicated by eating a bar of
chocolate.
Now before you start thinking I’m losing focus on this story, I want
you to understand why I was able to totally dominate and use the
four women I’m about to tell you about. I only blended my “inborn”
ideas on women with the knowledge in the book to come up with
some really powerful tenets to seduce my women and you may find
that they work for you too. In my estimate the two most powerful
are:
1. Make the victim come to you.
2. Make yourself an object of deep affection.
You may call me chauvinistic and scheming but I believe it’s a man’s
world and even God gave man dominion over all the animals on the
face of the earth (including women). I was never abusive to any of my
women and I did give them some affection. I make no apologies of
who I am and I pity the man who cannot control the women (and
sometimes men) around him. But I have also made mistakes; in fact I
believe one should beware of the man who hasn’t made mistakes in
the past for he has nothing to teach today.
MERCY “B’UKWU”
I consider myself a connoisseur of women and a fine judge of the
female form ‐ a Don Juan of sorts. When I saw Mercy at the bank she
had that “African thing” going on, you know: that booty thing?! I had
gone to the bank to withdraw cash for the purchase of my flat and
the moment I saw her I knew what I wanted to do with her.
She gave me the inspiration for my next scam idea right there
because while I watched her swing and sway as she went about the
hall, the thought that came to my head immediately was “I bet all the
male eyes in this bank are on her backside”. To confirm it I looked
around and as surely as the sun in Africa is hot, all the guys in the
banking hall were tracking her “back view progress”. I remember
thinking that a lot of men would pay good money for her and if I
could come up with a scam right away, I would milk most of the guys
in the hall right there.
I walked up to her and popped a question sure to get her attention
“What do you call a man that sees a business opportunity when all
others are drooling like cavemen?” she replied after a little laugh “I
think I would call him a capitalist”. To her quick wit I smiled and
continued “I have a business opportunity that lady, you can’t turn
that sexy back on”. I gave her my number and told her to call me later
with a promise that she would be glad she did. I took my cash,
nodded to her and left without another word.
She would call me up later that night and introduced herself as
Mercy, my “business opportunity” at the bank. I told her my name
and told her to meet me at that Golden Gate hotel the following
evening. I made sure I was seated at the bar of the hotel when she
walked in the next evening because I wanted to gauge the physical
reaction of the male folk to her presence in the room. She has this
oozing sexuality that is felt as powerfully as a designer perfume. She
sat down opposite me and I poured some Cristal on ice into her glass.
We got talking and I kept the discussion impersonal so that she would
settle down and feel at ease with me even as the wine worked its
magic.
Two hours and three Cristal bottles later I steered our talk into
personal territory and even after one hour I did that she was still
unburdening herself to me. It seemed like I had released a dam of
suppressed emotions inside of her after which she was spent and
clung to me weakly. I thought it would be cruel to leave her in that
condition and I felt guilty because I led her to that state. So I took her
to my place, got her to bed, took off her shoes and held her till she
slept off.
The next morning when she woke up I had already prepared her a
light breakfast which she ate without a word to me. After that she
took her bath still without uttering one word to me. She dressed up
and started walking towards the exit. I intercepted her before she
opened the door and the moment our hands touched she flung her
hands around my waist and sobbed quietly against my shoulder. This
time when I took her to my bed, it wasn’t for her to rest. After the
“hostilities” were over she loosened up and told me that no one had
ever had that effect on her because she felt she had known me her
whole life and could tell me anything but that when she woke up that
morning she was embarrassed at herself.
The night before she had revealed to me that she was on the run from
her husband who was an Ivorien businessman living in Abidjan, Côte
d'Ivoire. She was born in Lagos to Efik parents from Calabar, she was
twenty‐six years old and she spoke Efik, Yoruba, English and French
fluently. She had met her husband at a government dinner for the
French‐speaking community in Abuja.
She had been a hostess at the event and had caught the eye of Justin
who was in the country to purchase some electronic equipment for
his fast food chain in Abidjan. Several phone calls later, they began
dating. The man was charming in an old‐worldly way she had never
experienced before and a year from that dinner, they were married.
The moment she moved into his house, however, his attitude towards
her changed and overnight she had become a slave and prisoner in his
house. She had no one to complain to because she knew no one in the
new country and she had married Justin against the wishes of her
family. So she endured the beating and his foul temper until two
years later, when she decided she had had enough, she ran away from
her marital home one day while her husband was out to work. She
came down to Nigeria and was hiding at an old friend’s house. She
couldn’t reveal her whereabouts to her family because Justin would
surely find her through them.
I offered her a room in my flat until she settled down and got back on
her feet. At that moment she asked me about the business
opportunity I promised would gladden her. So I told her about my
“come and marry” con scheme, I gave her all the details and we
agreed on the terms, I would provide food and shelter and train her
while she would work the mugus and earn 30% of the total pay up.
She was all for it because she figured she could do a lot worse, given
her situation. I was also happy with my good fortune because she
would be able to work both guys who spoke English and guys who
spoke French. That day I took her to the Ikeja computer village to buy
a brand new laptop for her work. We also got her some good clothes
and had pictures taken of her in all positions both fully dressed and in
negligee.
Her training wasn’t really one because she could use the internet well
already and she really didn’t need me to explain to her how to be a
woman. All I did was to give her the proper guidelines to keep her
jobs on a schedule and not get distracted; in short I gave her a format
to the scheme. The next day she hit Yahoo chat rooms with the
determination of a woman given a second chance. It didn’t take her
long to make enough money such that she was be able to move into
her own place just three months after she started working for me.
Yeah, before I forget, in case you’re wondering about the “B’ukwu”
part of her name, I gave her the appellation because of her hips
(ukwu means hips in the Igbo language). So the name Mercy B’ukwu
seemed perfect for her as well as a joke on the French expression
“Merci beaucoup”.
CHIOMA (CHI‐CHI)
Of my four women, Chi‐Chi was the most unlikely for the post. She
was the mother of two sweet boys and the wife of a pilot at Nigerian
Airways. The family lived in the flat just before mine and I had always
been cordial with her, sometimes even buying snacks for her little
boys. I never had an inkling that she had a thing for me until one day
she came to my house on a pretext (I think she came to borrow a
movie disk, I truly don’t remember now). All I know is that one
moment we were standing and talking about Tom Cruise, the next
moment we were hurriedly undressing and heading for my bedroom.
In the end she didn’t even take the movie disk she had come for. I
have to confess that I had on many occasions undressed her with my
eyes, she has a body to kill for – breasts and hips like those of Gaia of
Greek mythology. That was how it all started and before long she was
serving me on a daily basis. She became a staple meal for me, to be
counted along with breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Now I say she was an unlikely candidate for two reasons, one being
that I never planned on getting physical with her in the first place and
two being that I only started considering her for my scams after I had
got Mercy on the job. I thought, hell, if Mercy could be induced into
it, why not Chioma? I had expected that she would be appalled at
such a suggestion but there she surprised me again, she thought it
would be a good idea to have something “worthwhile” and exciting to
do for a change (apart from sleeping with me that is, which was
getting quite out of hand and therefore risky).
Training Chi‐Chi was about the hardest task I had ever undertaken
and it quite baffled me. I had thought that having her natural
proportions would have given her an “early start” in her interaction
with men since it’s well known that attractive children get spoilt
quicker and start experimenting much earlier than their not‐so‐
attractive peers. After trying for weeks to get her to be able to bring
out that latent sexuality that she had in abundance, I was about to
give up until an idea came into my head. I suggested to her that
whenever she was working on a mugu, she should imagine that it was
me she was seducing and ignore everything else. That suggestion
worked like a charm and she was soon doing everything smoothly.
She had a computer at home so I just got her to convince her husband
to get an internet connection for her which he did. I was once told by
a wise man “never pay for what you can get for free” and I follow
wise advice.
Apart from having a hard time training her for the job, Chioma was
also a pain in the neck to keep on it. She needed constant
“stimulation” and “fine tuning” for her to work well. I shouldn’t really
call it a pain in the neck sha, if anything the “pain” came from the
nether regions whenever she needed inspiration for the mugus she
was scamming. But I thought what the heck, if that was what was
required to keep her making money for me I couldn’t complain. I
wasn’t even paying a Kobo to finance her jobs. I don’t know how she
balanced handling my jobs, taking care of her boys and her husband
while having me on the side. I guess where there’s a will there are
ways.
By the time I had these first two working for me, I thought I was on to
something. Previously thought to be a lazy jobbie’s scam, the come‐
and‐marry thing, I discovered, could be refined and taken from an
individual job idea to something akin to an assembly line process. For
example I could have a series of girls online working on guys from all
around the world. True, the pay from this scheme didn’t come in bulk
but for the fact it is built on natural and therefore unsuspicious
human interaction, it paid well over a longer period of time.
TOPE
Tope was my “doormat”. The girl for some reason didn’t see me a
mere human. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you
meet someone and you know from their behavior with you, your wish
was literally their command? Well that is how it is between me and
Tope, she was a first year student of LASU when I dropped out and
hearing stories of my Alagbon visit only took her crush on me to the
level of hero‐worship. She thought I was the very embodiment of
male perfection, a notion I have tried in vain to expunge. Anyway at
length I gave her an honorary title: President of my fan club.
We had had a “small” fling at first but when I grew wary of her clingy
nature, I gradually pulled away. She was not going to be an easy let
off and even after the passage of time she was still hounding me with
calls, text messages and getting any and everybody close to me to
talk to me on her behalf. It was impossible to give her a good reason
why I didn’t want to continue with her because she hadn’t done
anything that was so unforgivable so at the end I proposed a work‐
around to our case.
I proposed that for her to prove her worth to me, she had to work for
me on my scams, but I have a feeling that even if I told her to crawl
around Lagos on all fours for me, she would have ‐ a drowning woman
will clutch at toothpicks. I even let her know I had other girls already
working for me so she had to be up and doing, still she accepted.
Precisely the same determination with which she came after me she
applied on her scams. She was quite intelligent and didn’t need me to
idiot‐proof the training for her to catch up. She had a cerebral
approach to things and on her own she compartmentalized and
ordered her jobs in such a manner that I began thinking she had a
future on the 419 side of life. She had different sets of formats for all
mugu types depending on the mugu’s level of intelligence and social
classification. In no time Tope was churning out steady money for me
and there always seemed to be a higher pay up every other month.
My initial investment in her enterprise was N20 000 which I gave to
her to pay for bulk browsing time at a nearby cyber café and from
then, after her first victim paid $1 500, I got her a laptop and paid for
an internet connection for her to use at home. I took money from the
profit to refinance her and the rest of my 70% cut, she paid into my
credit card account.
It was just four months to my twenty‐sixth birthday so I was surprised
when Tope threw me a birthday bash from her earnings so far, that
was when it hit me that the girl was making more money for me than
the other two. When she had worked for me for six months, she came
to me and accused me of not keeping to my part of the bargain
because things had not improved between us and she knew she was
making more money than any of my other women.
She then asked for an adjustment in our sharing formula, she now
wanted 40% on all her jobs to which I agreed instantly because I felt
that would help keep her out of my hair. I also felt money was a
better motivation to keep her working rather than a hope for
reciprocated affection from me, I was even willing to give her 50% if
necessary to keep that income stream flowing.
Now you might be wondering how I kept these women all in check
and was sure they were not short paying me? Well the agreement
with each of them was that any payment from their victims was to be
made through Western Union and I was to be the recipient,
explanation being that I was a cousin who worked at the cash
receiving center.
Then how I was able to check up on their work? Answer: I had my key‐
logger covertly installed on all the computers my girls were using. So
I had access to all their email accounts, both the ones they used for
my jobs and others they thought I knew nothing about. I also knew
who they were scamming and how they were doing it. After a while
though, I saw that my women were sincere in their dealings with me.
Also it was becoming a real chore reading through all that
information because I was going through endless chat conversations,
email messages and all what not.
It was now almost a year since I met Mercy and the combined income
from the three women was standing at $4 000 to $9 000 monthly. I
needed one more girl.
PREIYE
Prieye, an Ijaw girl, was twenty‐two when I met her. She was student
at UNILAG and I think she is the woman for me. Ever wondered the
kind of person you would have been if you were born the opposite
sex? Well I have seen what I would have been if I was born a female.
Prieye is slim like me, dark‐skinned like me, cunning and imperial like
me. It seems like we are a natural pair but we fight, boy do we fight!
She reminds me of a jungle cat, like a black panther. You may
domesticate her but don’t think that if you starve her for food, she
won’t use you as a substitute.
I met her at her father’s house when I went with Onome to visit him
over some political ambition of Onome’s. Her father, Chief Vincent
Tamuno was a political power broker and Godfather of Delta state
politics. The moment we met, we hit it off like soul mates. She had a
touch of the spoilt brat syndrome and I was too much of a young Don
to bow to her will, instead I related to her like she was ordinary and
this greatly incensed her. Much later the Chief was to admit to me
that I was the only young man he had seen that his daughter couldn’t
overwhelm by her persona and he constantly teased her about it.
To know that I was a territory to which she couldn’t lay an outright
claim whenever she wanted didn’t go down well with her so she set
out to correct that imbalance of power in our relationship. With every
effort Prieye made to have her way with me, I bent her more to my
will and gained more points in showing her that she was no match for
me. I knew her game plan and it was very simple: Have him eating
from the palm of your hand then dump him to show him who’s in
control. I knew she wouldn’t want to beat around the bush so she
would throw her body at me like dangling a piece of meat in front of
a dog. I chose the “honorable” path when she did and rebuffed her
attempts thereby giving her cause to doubt her magnetism as a
woman.
She became a regular caller at my house and found every guise to
sleep over at my place. To make me more acquiescent to her
advances Prieye started doing things like cooking for me and cleaning
my house, things she would never have done for any man who asked
them of her. Before she knew what was happening, she was wanting
me for purely natural reasons and no longer because she wanted to
prove her supremacy over me. The day we made love it was like a
battle between two machines, bent on pummeling each other into
oblivion.
The moment the deed was done, Prieye returned to her original plan
and so did I. So I told her that I wanted nothing more to do with her
and that she was not to call me or come to my house for any reason. I
then threw her out of my house. I did this so that it would dawn on
her how much she had come to enjoy being with me. Prieye wasn’t
too concerned by my act because she thought I would change my
mind and that when I came begging she would play her joker.
By the time she had waited for a week and still got nothing from me
she got confused, by the second week she started showing up “by
chance” at places I frequented. When the third week ended and I still
hadn’t called her to sort things out Prieye became frantic, so she
hosted a pool party and invited me.
At the party she flirted with a classmate of hers whom she had told
me had been after her for months, making sure I noticed. I acted
nonchalant and proceeded to flirt with one of the girls at the party,
making sure I left the venue with her.
Two days after her party stunt, I woke up to find Prieye at my door,
she had been crying and she declared that she couldn’t bear it
anymore. She said she knew she could lose me due to her pride and
stubbornness and that when I left her party with the other girl, she
felt it should have been her. I knew I had tamed her then.
Saying I tamed Prieye doesn’t mean she became docile. No! Far from
that, it is a constant clash of wills whenever we come together. Case
in point: I realized that to make Prieye do something, all I had to do
was insinuate that she was too dumb, or weak, to do it and in a bid to
prove me wrong, she inadvertently did my bidding. For example, I
wanted her to start working for me so I teased her that she could
never take care of herself without getting a monthly handout from a
man and that she was no match for other girls who had learned to
survive on their own. Prieye responded that she could outdo my best
girl anytime so we had a wager of N100 000 for the girl who raked in
the most dough in a six month period. I made N300 000 from our
wagers before she had a chance to redeem herself. By that time it
had become a game of getting ahead between us.
From then on all I had to do was apply some cleverness to make her
do my will. Soon Prieye found she was enjoying the new sensation of
being able to earn good money for herself without having to depend
on anybody else. Jokingly I called it my program for the liberation of
Nigerian women.
After the entire “recruitment” process, these women were making me
a cool “salary” of between $6 000 and $12 000 monthly. Right now,
even three years later, they are all still with me and we’re all still
making money from my refined come‐and‐marry/romance scheme.
CHAPTER 5 ‐ GHANA EXPEDITION
I include this chapter with a bit of hesitation, mainly because events
described here don’t involve me having direct operational control of
the scams. I only add this gist to my story because the details still
forms a good part of my experience and shows you another side of
our world.
I have very fond memories of Ghana, mostly of their food but
especially of their women. The first time I ever went outside of
Nigeria (and even Lagos), was when I visited the capital city, Accra,
during an excursion trip back in primary school. My later visits were
mainly for business purposes though.
Once I had accompanied Onome there to stage a mugu from Russia
whom we had roped into a “mining contract” job. We had convinced
him that we were representatives working in an agency authorized by
the Ghanaian government to scout for international partners to whom
it would out‐source mineral mining operations. As agents from a
department of the Minerals Commission of Ghana, we were to
present him a gold mining license after he had already paid up a
sizeable amount as “administrative” charges.
The culmination of that job involved us setting up an office in the
administrative district of Accra city. The office, complete with guards
in original (but borrowed) police uniforms and government coat‐of‐
arms, would have fooled even a true Ghanaian citizen. The man,
Dmitri Malkovich, brought in the balance payment for the license
which was about $565 000 for which we exchanged with him a
beautifully crafted and authentic looking (but utterly worthless)
mining license.
Anyway, it was in Ghana that I reunited with someone from my past
who was now into fulltime “plastic” runs.
“DREADLOCK SNOOP”
Iyke “Dreadlock Snoop” Chinedu aka Mr. Common Good is a childhood
friend of mine who was “emigrated” to Ghana by his parents eight
years ago. He was sent to live with his uncle after he was expelled
from his secondary school in Nigeria for leading a group of boys who
had broken into the school principal’s residence to retrieve score
sheets for an exam they had written earlier.
They were found out after a fight between of one of the crew and his
roommate. The roommate later told on him by reporting to the school
prefect that his mate hadn’t slept in their room the night of the
break‐in. On further questioning plus not a few threats and strokes of
the cane thrown in, Bolaji told on Iyke and the rest of the “midnight
ninjas” (as they were to be so named by their schoolmates).
When questioned, Iyke would explain that he initiated the heist
because all of his friends and indeed the whole class had performed
badly in the said exam so he had stolen the sheets to force the
teacher to set up a re‐sit. He said he had acted for the common good
of his class. So when he and his cohorts were arraigned in front of the
school assembly to receive their punishment, the principal referred to
Iyke as “Mr. Common Good”. That’s how he came by the nickname.
Iyke would be made to repeat class four as he had to adjust to the
Ghanaian educational system by losing the last year of his academic
work in his former school. In the home of his uncle who was married
to a Ghanaian woman, Iyke who by then had lost most of that childish
naiveté, drifted into smoking of weed and listening to rap music,
especially that of Snoop Dogg. He barely made it through secondary
school and when he did, he celebrated his “liberation” from school by
cultivating dreadlocks. He had an uncanny facial resemblance to the
American rap artiste so his dreadlocks gave him the look of a Snoopy
on dreads, thus his second nickname “Dreadlock Snoop”.
Iyke’s aunt, Fanti, was a UK‐trained computer programmer who
worked in the Ghana ministry of information. She had books on
computers lying around in the house and one day the young man
aimlessly picked up a volume on software programming. He was
surprised to discover that the information in the book gave him an
insight on how to speak the computer’s native language, and not just
that, that he was intrigued enough to want to learn more.
That was the beginning of his career as a computer programmer and
it excited him to be able to create software codes that made a
computer system perform custom duties. It was only a little time
before Iyke would tire of just giving a computer a custom set of
instructions to perform, he wanted to be able to make the computer
behave in ways its manufacturer never envisaged. That was how he
dabbled into the shadowy realm of computer hacking. To him, normal
computer programming was like having a servant obey your normal
everyday instructions while computer hacking could be likened to
hypnotizing the servant into performing feats even he would never
consciously acknowledge being able to perform.
PHISHING FOR PLASTIC
Iyke would have been content just to be able to program and indulge
in some harmless hacking just for the fun of it but he ran into a
former friend and schoolmate from his secondary school in Ghana.
Chris who was studying in the UK had returned to Ghana to mark that
year’s Christmas season and they talked for hours that day. During
that discussion, Iyke learned of how guys in the UK made a living from
lifting credit cards and immediately draining them out by purchasing
items with them. The purchased items are later sold off to folks at a
cheaper rate and at the end of this process there is a tidy profit for
the credit card rustler.
Chris had called it “plastic runs” and kept on about how it was the
lucrative means by which he and his crew could live big in Europe.
Once again, Iyke found he was interested in the idea but he really
didn’t savor the thought of being chased and God forbid, caught and
deported by the police for credit card theft. On second thoughts, he
decided the entire process was too undignified for the image he had
of himself and set about finding if there was another means by which
he could get his hands on the credit card money without physical
danger to himself.
He didn’t have a clue until he undertook a job to create a website for
a job‐man who asked him to include a feature that allowed visitors of
the website to make contributions from their credit card accounts
from anywhere in the world – the job‐man was scamming mugus into
making contributions to a fictitious motherless babies’ home in
Kumasi. As Iyke designed and added that feature, something, like the
first piece of a picture puzzle, fell into place.
He already knew what email blasting was about but he had never
thought he would have a use for the method. In his maiden (though
quite naïve) operation, he didn’t just blast emails with the usual
story‐strory ending with respondents being beseeched to visit the
scammer’s website. Instead he blasted with a specially crafted email
which, with his programming experience, included logos of the home,
pictures of the inmates of the home and even short video clips but
most importantly, areas in the email with in‐built code that allowed
the viewers of the email to make their “contributions” directly into
the body of the email.
It was a novel and even ingenious idea but it’s one main flaw was that
most internet users were not so trusting as to enter their credit card
details into an email form that came from a stranger. Iyke monitored
the email address he had set up to collect the harvested credit card
information over the next twenty‐four hours but by the next day, he
had received just two replies from the three thousand email
addresses he had spammed. Quite a lousy profit margin by any
standard.
He was slightly disappointed but immediately set out to try out the
credit card details he had just collected. So he went a website where
computer software were sold and bought the full version of an exotic
program that enabled one to set up a computer grid. He had had his
eyes on the software for a long time and it had a price tag of $2 500
but he wasn’t worried now, the money was not his anyway! He made
the payment online with the credit card and proceeded to download
the software program. With his special email forms, the second piece
of the puzzle materialized. “Always pay with other people’s money
whenever possible” He remembered an investment once guru told his
audience.
The final piece fell into place right there as he was making the
payment at the online software store. He began to wonder just how
many of such payment transactions were made every day on a site
like that and thought of a way he could copy such a site and somehow
lure their real visitors to make entries from their credit cards into his
compromised clone website.
Like a scientist who had battled with the procedure of a lifelong
experiment and finally come up with a solution, he took some time
out to bask in the euphoria of his eureka! moment. He promptly
downloaded a free software application that allowed one to
download an entire website and installed it on his home computer.
He ran the software and proceeded to download the entire website
from which he purchased the grid software. He thought it ironic that
the site would “pay” him for the purchase he made earlier on it and
on a humour tilt, he felt “charity” should begin at home and tried to
remember if it wasn’t a biblical canon to “do unto others” as they
would you.
With the still‐active credit card information, he paid for an internet
domain with a name very similar to the actual address of the store
website. He knew it was going to be effective because even he had
made the mistake before of ending the address with “.com” instead
of “.net”. The next thing he did was to change the code of the
downloaded copy of the site to be able to retrieve credit card details
entered and send them to the same email address he had used
earlier. Other than that, every other thing on his clone site was
identical to the real one. When the website mugu would make the
purchase on Iyke’s clone site, he would still see the expected message
telling him that the transaction was successful. The only difference
was that as he clicked the SUBMIT button, all the details he had
provided would be forwarded to Iyke’s email, without any real credit
card transaction ever taking place.
Iyke uploaded and activated the clone website and then sat back to
monitor his “harvest” email address. By the evening of that same day,
he had amassed one hundred and twenty‐two real credit card details
and barely twenty‐four hours after he went live, he had almost three
hundred credit card accounts in his hoard. By the third day, with the
email account clocking over five hundred entries, Iyke got spooked
and shutdown his clone website. He didn’t know it then but he had
just successfully carried out what computer techies call a phishing
job.
Iyke was too scared of what he had done to even contemplate
spending from the new accounts for the next one month, so the
owners of the credit card accounts had no reason to suspect foul‐play
apart from the minor nuisance of the purchased items not becoming
downloadable as expected while those who expected shipped items
didn’t receive them as well. As they checked their credit card statuses
and noticed no deductions, they all concluded that it was nothing
more than a technical glitch at the online store.
Even with the collection of credit card details Iyke had amassed, he
really didn’t have a clue on how to convert that data into real,
spendable cash. What he did was to go into partnership with his UK‐
based friend Chris by forwarding an initial batch of fifty “plastic”
accounts. Chris complained that having to make all the purchases
online added a delay compared to using a stolen card to buy stuff in a
normal store although he had to admit that the fact there wasn’t any
physical risk to worry about more than compensated for the delay
period. The arrangement was that Iyke and Chris would split equally
the proceeds from the eventual sale of items purchased with the
credit card accounts.
Another thing Chris complained about was the fact that when one
made purchases online, there was the need to involve a third party.
This third party was required because purchased items had to be
shipped to a real location, so whoever was contacted was to provide
the receiving point for the items and was also to deliver them to the
real owner. This service was provided on a commission calculated on
the total cost of items per shipment.
The commission was usually hefty because with each successful
purchase and arrival of the goods at the specified shipping address,
that address becomes compromised and is soon abandoned. Usually
the requirements of the system demanded that only temporary
locations were used, these could be short‐term leases and rents of
less than one month. Sometimes hotel lodgings were used as the
shipping addresses for purchased items. This method helped keep the
cost of maintaining safe houses for the goods low enough for the
“plastic” boys to manage.
This cumbersome system had to be adopted because online shopping
stores had discovered early on that nine out of ten purchases by
credit card of items to be shipped to Africa were made with stolen
credit card details. This made all online sales services to disregard
any purchase with a shipping address specified as being located in
Africa. To overcome this setback the safe house and courier system
was created in the UK and now, whole gangs of Africans in Europe
thrive by providing this service.
A Moneygram international cash remittance from Chris, one month
later, would put a cool $5 000 into Iyke’s hand – his first contact with
foreign exchange of any type. After his initial earnings, Iyke decided
it was time to buy some much‐needed hardware, so he sent another
batch of fifty accounts to Chris but this time he asked that his portion
of the profits should be utilized to purchase seven top‐of‐the‐line
computer systems. Five desktop PCs and two laptop systems.
It was while he was in the process of setting up his computers that
we ran into each other one night in an Accra nightclub. That was
some weeks after the Malkovich job and Iyke had just returned to
town after a trip to Lagos to purchase equipment to set up a high
speed personal computer network. There has never been any
pretension between us, so we quickly caught up on old times and
later exchanged notes so extensively that by the time the night was
over, we had settled on areas were we could work together in the
future.
I agreed to show him the ropes on how to start an email address
trafficking operation like I was running back in Lagos under Onome,
plus the finer points on mugu psychology while Iyke promised to
introduce me to his secret “plastic” operation.
“DREADLOCK SNOOP” AND HIS SEVEN LADIES
I really shouldn’t be calling the seven of them “ladies”, in fact I
should be calling them “witches” because their behavior is anything
but ladylike. Anyway, please forgive me for rambling.
With his high speed network equipment and seven new computer
systems, Iyke set up a high speed network in the garage of his uncle’s
house. He also purchased a broadband internet connection and
hooked up his seven computers to the ‘net. Depending on his needs,
the computers could show up on the internet as several computers or
fuse together digitally to become one behemoth of a computer
system. With this special configuration, Iyke could wreak
considerable havoc on any internet connected computer he happened
to set his sights on. How he did it, in my mere‐mortal opinion, is in
the domain of the esoteric but I’ll try to explain it to you. Just don’t
expect advanced details from me – I’m not the man for that.
Through some programming wizardry, Dreadlock Snoop coded his
computer systems to act like the wraith‐like robot sentinels in the
movie “The Matrix”. Independently, they roamed around the World
Wide Web, searching for vulnerable computer systems (especially
servers) to be exploited and looted if necessary. They move silently
through the internet and whenever any of the seven finds an
exploitable computer, it executes probes of the target computer’s
defenses to determine its level of protection. If the defense probes
indicate the computer to be a server for a financial institution, its
digital particulars are collated and recorded for Iyke’s later
consideration. These probes are activated automatically by the
computers and the searches go on twenty‐four hours, non‐stop.
By the time Iyke goes through the so accumulated information, he
decides on “worthy” targets and then proceeds to unveil his seven
“ladies” for what they are. He initiates a network command on any
one of them and with this command given, all of the computers on his
network suspend whatever task they are performing and activate the
grid software he purchased. He had modified the grid engine such
that once activated, it digitally fused all the seven computer systems
into one by pooling their individual processing powers together. The
result is a very nimble but powerful hacking engine, the only of its
kind I know of. Once the process is complete, he sets the engine to
hack into the target computer system.
He usually left this automatic engine at it’s tasks and the most he had
had to wait was two days for the computer grid network engine to
complete it’s assignment. At the end of the duty cycle, the engine
outputs a single result file containing working usernames with
passwords into the target system. With this engine, Iyke could
penetrate and access bank records of most banks that provided
online access systems for its customers. He could create and modify
banking records in the hacked system as he so desired without having
to physically go to the bank (he never actually did this to my
knowledge sha).
This engine could also be used to perform what he called DoS attacks
which are executed against a computer system on the internet by
flooding it with false connection requests from numerous locations
from across the globe. This unprecedented flood of requests soon
overwhelms the capacity of the target server such that it soon starts
to refuse new (and legitimate) connection requests. With his grid
engine, Iyke can mimic connection attempts from thousands of
computer systems worldwide and channel this flood to any server he
wants.
When the target of this attack is a website, the result is that the
website disappears from the internet for the duration of the attack.
Even expanding the network bandwidth of the system doesn’t solve
the problem, because the engine only creates a thousand more
requests to swamp it again.
The Denial of Service attack was the means by which he phished a
popular South African trading website. He had already cloned the
entire site and modified the credit card details entry form to receive
payment data to his email account. He also bought two domain names
closely resembling the address of the original so that when he carried
out the DOS attack, his clones were already up and running, waiting
to receive mistaken visitors of the website. He ran the attack for the
entire trading day and shut it down after nine hours with his plastic
account tally now almost at one thousand credit cards.
The engineers of the website could only say that one minute
everything looked fine on their systems while the next minute it
seemed the whole world was trying to connect to their service. At the
end of the attack they would have no clue from whence the attack
came, nor why it came. Such is the proficiency of Iyke’s arcane
talents.
THE MAIN, THE MAIN
I once had this girl I was trying to nail and she kept giving me excuses
why she couldn’t stay over at my place. One day she told me her
father would kill her if she wasn’t home early. You see, I hate to see
folks with mixed up priorities. So to help her put things in proper
perspective, I asked her “Your father is your past, I’m your future.
Now which do you think is more important – the past or the future?”
So after witnessing Iyke’s act first‐hand, and even though I had to
give the man his dues, I couldn’t stop myself from asking him why,
with all his skills and the computing power at his disposal, he still
went after plastic money, when he could go after real money. That
was the start of our single joint venture.
By the time we had discussed the job, we came up with the following
game plan: Using the classic but now modified spam method, we
would blast a hundred thousand email addresses with solicitations
claiming our mail comes from their banking institution. We would
explain to the recipients that due to a technical overhaul of the login
authentication system of our online banking service, we would
require all our account holders to log into our (specified) website
within the next seventy two hours to confirm ownership of their bank
accounts. They are assured that their usual banking convenience
would not be hampered by this authentication process but warned
that any account holder that hadn’t logged in at the expiration of the
given time period risked losing access to our online financial services,
including use of their credit card accounts.
These addresses would be targeted with relevant information
customized for the source of the recipient email address. For
example, email addresses harvested from French email services would
have their content translated to French and include a link to a French
log‐in page identical to that from the bank’s original site. The same is
repeated for languages in the countries we would have sourced email
addresses from. Also we would mask our originating email address
with an address relevant to the targeted email address group.
Setting up the system was a complex process: harvesting the email
addresses, preparing the customized emails and cloning the relevant
web sites for the different banks. At the end of the preparation stage
which lasted one month, we had prepared content in eight separate
languages. We used Iyke’s grid engine once again to blast the mails.
He designed a computer code that allowed the engine to
automatically source email addresses from the internet and confirm
its status. It then determines (and later sends) the relevant content
to the email address by analyzing the recipient email address. With
this advantage we bypassed the back‐breakingly repetitious process
of manual sourcing and blasting of mails.
With the system set up and running autonomously, all we had to do
was sit back and wait for our mugus to start logging in. We didn’t
wait long. I guess when you convince folks that they may lose a
convenience as universal as access to credit cards, they comply very
quickly. They had no reason to suspect anything – we used the exact
same websites as they expected of their various banking institutions.
Once they accessed our website and logged in, they received a
message on the screen congratulating them on the confirmation of
their bank login authentication details.
The success of the operation lay on the fact that, most adults used
credit card services from a small number of major financial
institutions. Worldwide, there were just a few such providers so the
odds of our lure mails getting to their real customers were quite
good. We also increased our chances of success by researching the
more popular of these financial institutions by market share in all the
countries from which we got email addresses for spamming. We still
improved on that by cross‐referencing what we had with information
on which credit card organizations the different banks provided
services on behalf of.
The reason we spammed as much as a hundred thousand email
addresses was that we wanted to provide a very wide buffer to
compensate for recipients who would not fall for our lure mails,
transmission errors on our part (like sending the wrong content to
some addresses) plus a million other contingencies that may crop up
unexpectedly in the digital jungle of the internet.
Once the usernames and passwords started flowing in, we had to
work fast before our quarries made other enquiries about this
“overhaul”. We used the acquired login details to access the original
online accounts. Immediately we logged in, we turned off any
transaction reports feature that sent an alert to the real account
owner in the event of any transaction on the account.
During this runs we wound up opening a series of new “off‐shore”
prepaid credit card accounts and these were the accounts into which
we temporarily moved the money we got from this operation. We
knew that bank‐bank transactions were instant, unlike retailer‐bank
transactions that could require up to three days for closure. Still we
didn’t leave our money in any credit card account.
We would periodically empty our “plastic” accounts into an E‐gold
account I had maintained for some time. The reason for this is simple,
credit card transactions could be reversed and traced while E‐gold
transactions could not be reversed once initiated. In addition, E‐gold
accounts could be set up anonymously and as such, do not need full
or truthful disclosure of personal details.
The process of gathering our money took a far longer time than it
took us to set up the operation but by the sixth week of “harvest”, my
E‐gold account had swollen by $3 100 000. At the end of the harvest
process, three months later, we had received login details into almost
six thousand bank accounts from all across the globe but mostly from
Europe.
I eventually moved the proceeds out of the E‐gold account and had
them remitted into Iyke’s Ghanaian domiciliary account. We would
later share the proceeds 60/40 with me taking the forty percent for
my “advisory” role. Now you do the maths, what’s forty percent of
$12 860 000?
We celebrated this loot with both of us buying waterfront villas in
Ikoyi, Lagos, in continuation of a tradition I had started the moment I
got my “severance package” when I left Sizzler. I usually purchased
something exotic at the successful closure of any operation. To
remind me of my progress, so to speak. Sometimes I do a weekend
“lock down” of a hotel just for the heck of it: paying for all the rooms,
food, drinks and every other facility in the hotel for just me and my
inner circle.
Iyke would later top the acquisition of the villa by buying a yatch to
go with it. This was from the extra money he was raking in from
trading the quality email addresses his grid engine was churning out.
A simple land‐lubber like me just had to make do with driving a
Bentely coupe. Even though the hood listens with an envious ear and
watches with a jealous eye, I have to spend this money in time to
make space for more to come in. You can’t fight the future man, it’s
inevitable.
It sure feels good to finally have all that money to splurge but I will
never forget the fatigue we both endured while pulling out the money
from all those bank accounts.
CHAPTER 6 ‐ THE PATRIOT
During the period I was setting up my come‐and‐marry assembly line
system I continued to work with Onome on his jobs. Our scams were
lucrative and we both made good money at the time but I noticed
Onome was losing interest in the execution. More and more, he
began to leave the entire process to me. When I asked him about it
he admitted that the whole 19 thing was no longer engaging to him. I
felt this was understandable since the main reason he walked down
the path had been resolved years back. So when I asked him what he
wanted to do with himself, he said he was going into politics and
from the way he said it I knew he wasn’t trying to crack me up but the
very idea that a man who makes his money from deceiving people
wanted to lead others seemed quite ludicrous to me.
With his fabulous wealth, Onome was readily accepted into the elite
cadre of society where he became friends with a lot of powerful
Nigerians like Chief Tamuno who was a former minister of mines and
steel. He had used the wealth he had amassed during his tenure to
buy into the leading political party to emerge after Nigeria returned
to democratic rule. With the amount of money he brought into the
party, he was given a free hand to choose where he wanted to “chop”
(eat) from. Being the wily man he was, instead of choosing to have
the governorship of his home state, he elected to be the regional
leader of the party in the entire Niger‐Delta region. This effectively
gave him the status of political “Godfather” and omnipotent of an
area covering five states in the country.
As such, anybody who had any kind of political aspiration in those
five states had to come to him to ensure success at the polls. He was
as powerful as he was ruthless to his political opponents or to
opponents of the men he sponsored. So when Onome had his
“calling” to politics, Chief Vincent Tamuno was the man we had to go
see to receive the “anointing”.
The day we got there was the day I saw wealth for what it was:
Power. The money Onome had made through his 419 career had
already gone ahead of him to give him high standing with the Chief.
We arrived there in a convoy of three brand new Hummer H2 SUTs.
Two were painted black; one was white with ribbons on the door
handles and grill. Onome’s signal was clear. He wasn’t out to mince
words on his ambition and he was ready to pay the cost. The white H2
was a gift to the Chief to open an easy path to Onome’s request and
with it, Onome’s entry into the Nigerian Senate was certain.
With the Chief’s blessing, Onome really didn’t need to campaign in
his constituency to get elected to the Senate, but he did anyway. He
wanted to be known by his people. He confided in me: “Even if I don’t
need their votes to win the senate ticket, I still need them to know
my face, for this is just Genesis”. He spent roughly N14 500 000 to
print posters, put in adverts in the dailies and broadcast media, give
gifts to all the major chieftaincy title holders in the region. His
father’s successful career as a policeman only aided his acceptance
because the older generation of politicians who had dealt with the
late ASP Philip Osaro took his son as one of their own.
The voting process and subsequent declaration of winners was only
formality because for those of us in the know, the winners of the
election had been selected long before the campaign period. Onome
and the other 108 Senate appointees were sworn in after the 2003
elections and that night Onome threw another of his lavish parties at
his 19‐room palace at Abuja.
Now if you think the Nigerian Senate is somewhere Onome went to
pay his dues to Nigeria and to work patriotically for his country, you
have another think coming. It was in fact somewhere he went to have
Nigeria work for him and pay him its dues. The Nigerian legislature is
a place where some of the richest Nigerians come together to
continue to enrich themselves. They are like a group of young boys
who go camping to have some free time with nature, but in this case
they’re having a free time with our money. When one of the senators
suggests “Hey guys, let’s make a bill for a N15 000 000 “furniture
allowance” for ourselves”, the rest quickly support the idea. It’s like
when one of the camping boys comes up with a fun idea like “Hey
guys, let’s go for a swim in the pool!” No one ever opposes that kind
of “fun” idea.
That was how the furniture allowance saga started. According to
Onome, no one knew how the suggestion came up but before you
could say “419!” all the senators were backing the bill and even
against the public outcry of insensitivity and greed on the part of the
Senators, it was passed into law. “Now can you beat that?” Onome
said, “Out of nowhere all of us wey be senator don hammer fifteen
milla. That one alone don do to pay us back the investment wey we
use take campaign for senate ticket!”
That was the very first of a series of funds the house of Senate used
to help themselves to Nigeria’s money. All they had to do was to
come up with whatever reason to raise a bill for senators’ welfare,
sign it into law and collect the money. Onome called it “political 419”
or “patriotic job” and he said nothing in the 419 world could compare
to it because it was safe to execute since the bills could be signed
into law anytime and you didn’t have to spend time and resources
convincing anybody to pay you the money, plus, the money was
always there to take.
The Senators were not the only ones with smart ideas, the
Representatives soon started their own political 419 and even the
chairmen of local government areas around the country followed by
starting their own “poverty alleviation schemes”. I love this country!
GHOST FROM THE PAST
One person I never thought I would come across again was Sizzler.
Last I heard of him, he was working with some hare‐brained guy‐man
called Capo in South Africa. That’s why when he came at me, I was
more surprised and amused than worried. I figure he aimed at me
because he couldn’t touch Onome high up in the Nigerian senate. But
really, some old job‐guys don’t get it. In this 19 thing of ours, old
glory counts for nothing. When there’s a new generation running
things, best don’t be trying to step out of line. Respect your age and
be content with reminiscing about your good old days.
Sizzler’s attempt at me was as feeble as he had become. Imagine the
old goat sending common area policemen to my house by alleging
that I had 419 documents at my house? When the men arrived, I
calmly brought out a wad of one thousand Naira bills and slapped the
senior officer hard with five bills in my right palm. He saluted me and
hailed me with “All correct! Sir!” The junior officers all promptly lined
up to be slapped too. As they were leaving I called back the sergeant
and asked him the source of their tip off. He gave me Sizzler’s
address and I told him to return the next day for a small assignment I
had for him. When he came the next day I handed him a set of
documents and gave him a part payment of N25 000, with the other
half to come when the EFCC had arrested Sizzler. He didn’t need me
to tell him what to do.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was the new sheriff in
town and the fear of EFCC was the beginning of wisdom for many a
job‐man. The commission had a single‐mindedness of purpose and
many new breed chairmen capitalized on that zeal to eliminate the
competition. I already had my guy at the EFCC tipped off and ready to
move in with his squad so when I got the affirmation from the police
sergeant I gave him the nod to proceed.
Sizzler was apprehended with documents linking him with half a
dozen past scam operations involving a total of almost $6 000 000.
The evidence was so overwhelming that the EFCC didn’t need to do
much further investigating. They just contacted some of Sizzler’s
victims and got the full picture of his operations. Five of the
foreigners were willing to come down and testify against him and
over a period of six months, Nigerians were treated to real live
courtroom drama as Mr. Fortune Ikechi was tried and found guilty of
defrauding innocent foreigners under section 419 of the Nigerian
criminal code.
For the thirty‐two counts charge of fraud and forgery‐related crimes
brought against him, he bagged two thirty year sentences, back to
back.
I never liked ghost stories; in any case, I believe any restive “spirit”
should be put to rest once and for all. Now let me tell you a little
about the future.
THE ASCENSION
With Onome safely in politics and Nigeria safely in the hands of
Onome and others like him, it’s time to get things on the 419 side of
life shaken up big time.
While Onome was campaigning for his senate ambition, we had a
gradual hand over process whereby he relinquished all his ties to the
19 world and washed his hand from all things fraudulent. It would not
be wise to leave stuff like that lying around for his political
opponents to use against him now, would it?
The process wasn’t difficult because right from the time we started
working together till the point when he started losing his scamming
appetite I played the major roles on our jobs. The main thing he had
to do was to erase all scam links to him. So things like bank accounts
were closed down and he paid good money to have all his transaction
records destroyed. He never used his real name for anything remotely
connected to his jobs so his identity was never going to be an
exploitable concern.
Now with me fully in charge of things in our neck of the woods, a lot
of changes are coming. It sure feels good to be called “Chairman” but
it’s not enough.
First thing that is coming is what I call the grassroots initiative or the
cultivation. It excites me to think of it. I am going to start something
like the Big Brother, Big Sister help program in America. Only in this
case there will be a hierarchy of relationships. I will explain. I will
look for two of the most trustworthy guys I can find in my
neighborhood, they will both be very intelligent and must be ready to
learn. When I have trained them and they are competent enough to
handle jobs for me, I will push them into phase two of their training.
They will both go out and each will bring in two more guys who they
would be responsible for. The only rule being that they would not be
related to who they brought in and there would not be any form of
inter‐relating between groups. They would train their selectees by
themselves and under my final supervision and permission these new
ones will be introduced into our trade. I will continue this chain until
my group is fourteen‐men strong. They would be the first family.
The second thing I would do is the injection. Before this injection
stage I will “shuffle” the men and their groups. I will group team
leaders with the trainees from other groups and this final grouping is
how they would work onwards. The reason why I would do this is first
to have the men train their selectees diligently because they know
they would be responsible for them then secondly I would shuffle the
men to break whatever attachments they may have forged that might
work against my intentions later on.
These men and their groups will execute jobs I assign to them and
over a four year period I will watch them and gauge their progress.
When I am satisfied with their abilities I will have them spread across
the world where we have “business links”. They would be our men on
ground zero, the ones to stage our mugus in‐country. They would
meet with and work with our brethren 19 guys to make sure they are
grounded and protected from mistakes that show them as JJCs
(“Johnny Just Come” or new comers). They would collaborate with the
others for a period of about three years.
The third thing I would do is consolidation. I’m going to eliminate the
competition in all the countries where we have a presence. That is
when my ground zero men would prove most useful: they would
supply information about the other job‐men operating in that
country. Then we make our move and when I say elimination, I’m not
implying asking them politely to leave the country.
My aim for these steps is to create the first ever worldwide fraud
syndicate. Hell, I’m tired of having to combine with some idiot abroad
to pull some offshore deal off. Then after they’ve almost bungled the
job, they give me a hard time when it’s time to share the loot. This
time I’m going to have my men in the main countries where we do
business.
In the early days of the Mafia, it took only the will and power of a
single man to gather the competing and oftentimes warring groups of
criminals and welded them into one efficient and therefore powerful
body, so that they are now called “organized crime”. I’m going to do
the same through my people to achieve “organized fraud”. You think
this is funny or impossible? Wait till you see me operating in your
hood then you’ll know for sure.
419 ADVOCATE
Many people ask me if I have diversified my wealth into other
legitimate businesses in preparation for the rainy day and I reply that
I don’t need to because like a faithful wife, 419 will always be there
for me. If it seems like a stupid thing to say, listen to my reasoning.
Asking me to save for a rainy day is like telling a prostitute to save for
a rainy day. Now tell me, since the inception of civilization when has
the prostitute ever had to starve for lack of business? You see fraud
works on human emotions and is built on the most powerful of human
weaknesses: greed, love of money ‐ even more powerful than carnal
lust. We all have that criminal gene in us and all I have to do, like in
the case of the prostitute, is allow you exercise it. Simple.
So, for as long as I can make people believe there is a quick fix to
their lust for money, I will always have mugus. So like the prostitute
who whenever she needs money, goes out and whores a little more,
when I need more money, all I have do is to go out and scam a “little”
more. Instead of asking me to save for a rainy day, a better use of
your time and energy would be to get the remainder of humanity to
stop being greedy not a little foolish. By my activities alone,
thousands have become wiser and therefore a lot more useful to the
community of men.
When most of my colleagues are asked what gives them that moral
justification to deceive and extract money from innocent people
worldwide, they respond by saying they are collecting “slave money”
from the white man. That is, they are making the white man pay for
the slaves their fathers came to Africa to harvest free of charge
(giving a few African village chiefs bottles of rum and some rusty old
guns doesn’t qualify as payment, my dear) only to be sold at
enormous profit in the Americas and Europe. From our findings some
of the big multinational corporations that have been around for a
long time benefited immensely from the slave trade.
My response to that question is “Since when did one need moral
justification to make money from using his head?” No one ever put a
gun to a mugu’s head to pay up the money I get from him. And
whoever told you that those “innocent people” worldwide are that
innocent? They are as criminally minded as the rest of us and that is
why our scams work on them. Any child who was raised in God‐
fearing society would never fall for the schemes that trip their peers
in life. It only goes to show that the white man’s intellectual
development has peaked and is in a decline if an “illiterate” African
monkey can swindle him of millions of Dollars. It also shows that the
commonsense and moral teachings that help one avoid life’s biggest
traps are quite eroded in the West.
At the last count, total money lost to scam and other 419‐related
schemes stood at about tens of billions till‐date, over $4 billion
worldwide in 2007 alone, according to independent statistics. Some
reports say that in the USA alone about $1 000 000 is lost to 419
scams daily and that over £120 000 000 is lost in the UK annually.
That’s a lot of “repatriated” money from the West alone and believe
me when I say that figure is nothing close to the actual amount. The
white man should see it as a yearly contribution to helping the
continent of Africa.
ORGANIZED FRAUD
Lagos deserves to be put on the world map. It deserves to be on the
same pedestal as Sicily and Medellin. This is because (Festac town,)
Lagos is the birthplace of the modern fraud syndicate and most of the
major 419 chairmen worldwide can trace their early days to Lagos,
Nigeria.
Lagos deserves to be on the map but it’s not going to get there by
itself. Sicily got on the map because of the organized mob and Mafia.
The Mafia only became famous worldwide because of the notable
lifestyles and activities of a few mob bosses like Charlie "Lucky"
Luciano. The same can also be said about Medellin which got on the
world map because of the drug cartels and the ruthless personalities
of the cartel leaders like Pablo Escobar. I am going to be that
personality that takes fraud from a loose confraternity of
independent con men to a universal family of fraudsters.
So it’s time to make room for one more notorious personality. Add
him to the list: he is called “chairman”, his origin is Festac town,
Lagos, Nigeria and his specialty is international fraud. Italians have
organized crime, Sicily, and their dons. Colombians have the cartels,
Medellin and their drug lords. Nigerians would have unified 419,
Lagos and their chairmen. Call it our contribution to world
development.
It may take me ten to twenty years to achieve this but trust me, at
the end of this venture, the world would know my name.
An orphan who becomes a 419 conman later avenges the loss of his
parents and home while dodging the treachery of old friends.
END